


Reverie

by gwyneth rhys (gwyneth)



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dreamscapes, Dreamsharing, Friendship, Multi, Post-Black Panther (2018), Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Virtual Reality, Wakanda (Marvel), Wakandan Technology, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, of sorts if you squint hard
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:42:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25983031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwyneth/pseuds/gwyneth%20rhys
Summary: “Exitus!” Steve shouted, slamming his hand against the door where the mandala should have been, and suddenly he was on the chair in his room, gasping. In this world.Steve lowered the glass to his lap and looked up at Shuri. His heart was beating way too hard and fast. “You were right,” he said, sitting up. “He’s glitching. I don’t know if I can get him out.”
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Shuri
Comments: 51
Kudos: 65





	1. Apertus

**Author's Note:**

> Some of the characters listed won't appear until subsequent chapters, just to let you know. Ratings and tags may change, as well.
> 
> This is an AU based on the short-lived TV show _Reverie_ from 2018, basically stealing most of its concepts and giving them to Shuri.

From the air, Oakland appeared largely unchanged to Steve’s eyes, even though he knew the Wakandans’ influence was already noticeable to anyone familiar with the area and spreading outward as the rest of the world woke up to their existence. He steered the quinjet to the coordinates T’Challa had sent for the private airfield their Talon jets used, where his squad could be hidden from U.S. security, registered as a Wakandan plane with diplomatic privileges. 

He’d been to the Bay Area only the once anyway, a lifetime ago, and the USO show had been in San Francisco proper then, but he’d seen plenty of updates from the Wakandan contingent over the past months about the rapid progress they’d made. The area residents must have felt a bit like he had upon his resurrection when confronted with the pace of the alterations to their world—like those citizens who’d lost eleven days in the change from the Julian to Gregorian calendars, going to bed on September 2 and waking up on September 14. 

At least here they were gaining something from these mysterious new guests, Steve thought, instead of losing everything they’d known and loved.

Under the intense luster of the California sun they landed, and he went to the back of the plane to change into civilian clothes. Sam and Natasha had been in theirs since they’d taken off in Canada; neither of them enjoyed wearing their uniforms unless they were actually on-mission and relentlessly mocked Steve for usually wearing his, mostly because he didn’t believe in it anymore. Which wasn’t entirely true, but far too complicated to explain.

The two of them were heading off in one of the cars T’Challa had left for them, so they could drop in on Scott Lang; Sam still felt guilty about everything, as though he’d roped an unwilling Scott into the whole Leipzig disaster and gotten him stuck on the Raft, and Natasha insisted Sam was better off if she went along, what with Lang being under house arrest and all. The notion that the FBI could thwart Natasha Romanov from contact with him or Clint by means of surveillance and an ankle monitor was hilarious, but cute that they tried, Steve supposed.

The other car was for him, so Steve punched up the GPS and got on the road. It was beautiful here. The outreach center was situated in a long-neglected area for a multitude of more meaningful reasons to the royal family, but it didn’t hurt, to Steve’s eyes, that they’d chosen a shining, singular landscape, even though it was here within this bleeding and broken country. 

But Steve always saw things through clearer, less clouded eyes now, as though some veneer glossing over all that was wrong here had peeled away, first with Hydra inside SHIELD and then with the events of the Accords. Everyone—city, state, country—wanted a piece of what this small African country could provide, and maybe the worse thing was that they thought they deserved it, that embracing the future Wakanda offered meant they had erased the injustice of the past. 

Still, he wanted to hear how Shuri and Nakia and T’Challa were finding it, now that they’d spent more time here. He appreciated seeing things through the eyes of his new friends, the clarity of the view.

Steve tried not to let the anxiety of the catalyst for the visit chip away at his mood: Princess Shuri hadn’t been willing to divulge much about her reasons for bringing him to Oakland as soon he was able to come; she’d only given him a distant “yes” when he’d asked if it concerned Bucky and the cryostasis. Her gaze had shifted to the side in the projection rising up from his kimoyo bead, before offering him a conciliatory smile, and the lurching sense of uneasiness that had given him left him a bit shaken. 

Even without the actual street number, Steve would have known the outreach center as soon as he’d climbed the hill and seen the soaring shapes of the roof line: there were no buildings like this anywhere in the U.S., he was certain. It was startling to see that they’d finished transforming all three derelict apartment buildings already, but he supposed it shouldn’t be—it was the Wakandans, after all.

The old church across the way was no longer boarded up and appeared to be completely revitalized, and Steve heard the hour’s silvery ring and shouts from young men playing a pickup game in its newly lush parking lot carry through his open window. He parked in the visitors lot, now shaded by trees and looking nothing like the condemned property it had once been, and went up to the main entrance with its familiar Wakandan letterforms welcoming visitors and the transliterated English below them. The doors parted with a soft _whoosh_ to reveal Ayo waiting to greet him, wearing not her uniform but a vibrant magenta dress and tiered gold rings stamped with geometric shapes around her neck, the top one of which broke away to snake up along her neck and around her left ear, ending in a perfect pink matched gemstone drop. Bands around her wrists and arms matched the neck rings, but he knew that there were weapons hidden inside them. Ayo was from the Mining Tribe, he recalled, and they usually wore elaborately made jewelry. She smiled and said, “Captain,” grasping his shoulders and pressing her cheek against his.

“Ayo, it’s good to see you.” Steve returned her embrace, put his fist to his chest and bowed slightly. “You look at home here.” Where Shuri or the king went, Ayo went, but it was no secret she’d been fairly unhappy about the whole venture, as were most of the Dora Milaje: they viewed this country as barbaric and unsafe for their monarchs, and he couldn’t really blame them, although T'Challa could certainly take care of himself. Well, Shuri too—all of them, really. 

“I am...learning to relax my standards,” Ayo said with a wry grin. “Come, let me show you the inside as we go to the princess.”

The three separate apartment buildings had been brought together through landscaping and structural changes to the building, creating one large campus of sorts, which extended to some of the nearby houses and apartments that now housed many of the students’ families. Different architectural and design styles from all over Africa were represented throughout the buildings; they hadn’t restricted themselves only to Wakanda. The atriums and seating areas on the ground floor felt like microcosms of the continent, from dry, flat savannas to lush green jungles, snow-capped mountains to vast lakes and rivers. And dotted everywhere was the rich, vibranium-infused wood of the Jabari. It was truly a marvel.

Steve wasn’t sure which area was for science and technology and which for the social and community outreach Nakia was spearheading, but when they walked into the last building, in the shape of a sort of ziggurat, he knew they were in Princess Shuri’s dominion. It reminded him a bit of Steptown in the Golden City, busy and bright and colorful but with that sheen of technology and futurism laid over it, and he found his shoulders relaxed a little, lifting some of the exhaustion of the past six months. He wished now that Sam and Natasha had come with him to see this.

“Come. The main laboratory is on the top floor,” Ayo said, ushering him into an elevator that was almost ridiculously science fiction-y. There was that familiar twinge of grief for the life he’d left behind when he became a fugitive, for Tony’s technology that had been so integral to the Avengers’ buildings and their gear, to Steve’s identity in this modern world. “Princess Shuri enjoys the view,” Ayo said kindly, as though she was aware of this burst of melancholy in him, even though she didn’t know him well enough for that. As warm as she was being, though, Steve couldn’t help the feeling creeping around the edges of his mind that there was something…darker, for want of a better word, which concerned her.

The space Ayo led him to was as gleaming as the princess’s lab at home, but filled with young kids, distinctly American in dress and behavior. They stood at the elevator for a few seconds, Ayo letting him take it all in. It made him smile to see how busy the kids all appeared to be, working away at the couple of huge tables full of vibranium modeling sand or playing one of the foosball games sprinkled around or running some problem on the glass readout panels along the wall. You could see part of the Bay from here; Wakanda was a landlocked country so he imagined the vistas must be particularly appealing to someone raised there. 

“Captain Rogers, there you are!” Shuri chirped from his left, startling him out of his reverie, and Ayo stifled a laugh. “So good to see you. Thank you for coming—it makes me feel so powerful that I can command an audience with you.” She grinned and hugged him, then pulled back to look at him critically, and he half expected her to wet her thumb and rub some dirt off his forehead like his mother used to when she’d looked at him like that. 

Steve said, “Before you ask, yes, I work too much, no, I’m not taking as good care of myself as I promised Bucky I would, and yes, Sam and Natasha are all right.” Everyone had assured him there were no ill feelings toward Wanda anymore, but Steve tended to minimize discussing her with them if it wasn’t vital, and she had yet to meet formally with anyone from the royal family. He knew T’Challa didn’t hold Lagos against her, especially after he found out about the Raft, but Steve was always careful in these situations. Besides, his visits to Wakanda had always given her an excuse to run off for some time with Vision.

Shuri laughed. “I will text my brother with a full report.” She wore a bright purple dress that complemented Ayo’s well, and he could see black threads of vibranium woven throughout the fabric, giving it a shimmery texture.

“Where is he?”

“He sends his regrets—there was some sort of trouble at the western border and he had to leave before you arrived. He was very put out.” That probably meant yet another attempt by someone to sneak in to Wakanda—or maybe to try to invade. While T’Challa was confident no one would succeed, the pressures on the throne, on the guardianship of the Border Tribe, had increased exponentially now that the world knew about the treasures within its boundaries. 

“I’m sorry to miss him…and Nakia?” Both Shuri and Ayo made faces at his sad attempt to discern where their relationship status was at. But dammit, Steve just wanted someone, somewhere to be happy and in love and together, and T’Challa and Nakia were pretty much the only candidates for that Steve knew of right now. If he was honest, he envied them their future and their happiness, how very star-crossed they _weren’t_. 

“She went with him as far as Europe, where she went on to Amsterdam,” Shuri said, working hard at not laughing at him. “You know, for a TED Talk.”

He glanced up at the ceiling; the princess loved to troll him. “So, what did you want to talk to me about? The fact that you wouldn’t tell me much even over encryption left me a little…”

Normally, she’d have called her audience in the Golden City, but Shuri had been in Oakland and he and the team had been in Alberta, north of Edmonton, taking down a remote location for AIM, who seemed intent on picking up from where Tony’d left them. 

Shuri cocked her head sideways, glanced around the lab at all the kids. “Let’s go to my office,” she said, in the same slightly discomfiting way Ayo had spoken before. “Excuse us,” she said and Ayo inclined her head in acknowledgement.

Her office was nothing like anyone’s he’d seen before, naturally—an eclectic mix of laboratory like she had at home, what he’d learned was called Afropunk décor, teenage pop culture stuff, and multiple spots where it looked like the kids could crash or do things like...play video games, he supposed, because he wasn’t sure what else kids did these days. He walked over and gazed out the window while Shuri closed the door behind them, taking in the city spread out before them.

“For a while, I’ve been working on the problem of how we can remove the triggering words from Sergeant Barnes’s mind,” she said, standing next to him, solemn in a way he’d never seen her before. 

“That’s very… Your Highness…” So many horrendous things had happened in her life recently, and she’d never really had a chance to breathe before she’d had to put together this technology outreach center—that Shuri herself would take the time for such a pursuit was truly touching. Anyone else would have left it to an associate or the doctors.

But Shuri pulled a face. When Steve didn’t apologize for using her title, she rolled her eyes and moved on. They were fairly evenly matched in the stubbornness department, Sam had pointed out a few times. 

“A few years ago, I developed a virtual world concept that I thought might be useful someday. It wasn’t perfect and needed more work, but my brother gave me some ideas and I filed them away for the future.” Most people forgot that T’Challa himself was a talented scientist, because the lineage of Black Panthers had always been deeply connected to science and the technology of using vibranium. “I’d been doing some testing with it after Sergeant Barnes went into the cryofreezing chamber, refining it till it was ready. I thought it would be the most effective way to rid his mind of those words for good.” The anger in her voice almost made him smile. Though she’d only known Bucky for a few days, they had appeared to instantly forge a bond.

“I know what virtual reality is, but, um…how would that deal with the activation?” He’d heard Tony talk about BARF, back before everything had gone to hell. He’d even shown Steve a prototype, and Steve had to admit it had, as Tony was fond of saying, wigged him out: the uncanny valley aspects, certainly, but as someone who’d passed through time to an unrecognizable world that had seemed built out of whole cloth, seeing the past re-created and remade like that had been disturbing in a way he couldn’t articulate at the time. Maybe that was the heart of it: this actual world seemed “virtual” enough to him, even six years on.

“What you’re thinking of is…I believe it’s more external,” Shuri said patiently, but there was an element of derision in it, too. “This is more fully an immersive virtual world, almost indistinguishable from reality. What it does is provide a way to truly go inside your mind, because there is a computer-brain interface at its core—the computer is integrated with living tissue and implanted in the body. You are thinking things and feeling them. They are not programmed from the outside, in that sense. You control it when you’re inside, so it can be anything there you want it to be; it’s not like… Well, it wouldn’t be Mr. Stark creating an artificial world through his AI, or even someone like Ms. Maximoff, externally controlling it through a power. My brother told me you had spoken with her about taking those words out of the sergeant’s mind.” 

They’d had that conversation not long after the rescue from the prison, Steve asking if it was possible for her to tackle removing the sequence the same way she’d entered the Avengers’ minds. Using that power was an option of last resort, though, he’d quickly realized: she was still shaky from what had happened in Lagos and with the Accords, the Raft, and the thought of manipulating anyone’s mind again made her apprehensive, to put it mildly.

The princess’s gaze searched his face, maybe wondering if he was struggling too hard with her explanations and she should dumb it down a bit. “The impossible becomes possible—you could do anything you wanted with the right inputs, including possibly creating a state where that sequence of words never had any power in the first place.”

“You mean like…” That sounded almost magical, more than anything even Tony’s program could do. Wiping out decades of suffering, of Hydra’s brutality. Giving Bucky back control. “That’s incredible.”

“There is a great deal of science we are still discovering, even in Wakanda, especially of the brain. I can bore you with all the details later.” 

“So if we hook Bucky up to this—this—” 

“I called it by a word that means a sort of…waking dream, daydream, I think, in English.” She tapped on a kimoyo bead to search for a more accurate translation. 

“Like a reverie?” Steve asked and she looked up with bright eyes.

“Yes! Reverie, let’s call it.” With a flick of her wrist, the translation program went away.

Yet there was a reason she was discussing this with him here and now, in Oakland, instead of sending him to the Golden City to see a freshly recovered Bucky. He raised his brows, waiting for her to deliver the bad news. With a grimace, she said, “But you see, Sergeant Barnes is already using it. And that is where the problem lies.” Now he understood why they’d seemed so tense, urgent.

His stomach plummeted. Here Steve had been concerned about the things that could go wrong merely with the cryofreezing process—not because he doubted the Wakandan doctors or Shuri’s genius, but because there were still so many unknowns about Bucky’s mental and physical health. As much as they’d uncovered about the Winter Soldier program and about Zola’s experiments, as much as Bucky was remembering, it was still a big fat zero compared to what they were in the dark about, particularly with regard to the conditioning process, the way they’d broken him down and remade him in the first place. And Steve had never wanted Bucky to go back into suspension, anyhow, but Bucky’d been so damn cavalier about everything. “Anything they do here is a walk in the park compared to before,” Bucky’d said, shaking his head at Steve’s fussing. 

“So he was out of the cryo chamber?” Steve asked, trying not to sound petulant—Bucky had never contacted him. Why wouldn’t he have contacted Steve if he’d been awake?

Shuri sat on one of the couches and motioned for him to sit down, too. “He wanted to test it out—he felt very hopeful about it, but he didn’t want to bother you until he could tell you himself that he was all right.” _Bother me. For Christ’s sake,_ he thought. She sighed, and some of the light seemed to go out of her. “I think, in his way, he wanted to do this by himself, to prove something, perhaps.” 

“Yeah, that sounds like him,” Steve said in what he hoped was a comforting tone of voice. This was too much responsibility for a young woman her age, Steve thought, not for the first time. She should be having fun with the center she’d helped design and going to concerts and traveling the world instead of trying to fix “broken white boys,” as she’d called them. 

“You see, another reason I held on to the program was that the more I have seen of the outside world, the more I know how badly it could be abused. There would instantly be hacks posted everywhere, governments, especially militaries, would misuse it, anyone who believes the ends justify means. And individuals, too. I made it for therapeutic purposes, yes, but…most of the drugs that people become addicted to were developed for therapeutic reasons first, no? If your life was terrible, would you wish to limit yourself to a few hours inside a perfect world of your own creation?”

Such a device would definitely not have had the same response outside a place like Wakanda, Shuri was absolutely correct. They had their own problems, like any country—even aside from what had happened with the king’s cousin and his closest friend—but their society was vastly stronger than any other he knew of. “So you’re saying Bucky got in there okay but he doesn’t want to come out.” All this time and he’d thought Bucky was safe, secure, not…trapping himself in a virtual reality program.

“I don’t think it’s on purpose,” she said, as evenly as she could, and that only added to the shock. “I think something’s gone wrong, and he’s trapped because they—Hydra—did something to his mind we couldn’t anticipate. Didn’t anticipate.” Her hands clenched into fists. “He is unconscious, almost like a coma.” With a tap of her bead an image came up, of Bucky in what looked like a hospital bed. He appeared as peaceful as he had when he entered into cryo, but it left Steve unsettled. She sent the image away.

“If there’s an interface, as you said, couldn’t you just…remove whatever it is? Cut him off, if he can’t do it himself.”

“I won’t waste time with the science just now, but that’s a good question—it’s only that I am afraid severing the connection when someone is that deep within it could cause neurological damage. No one who had tested the versions of…Reverie has experienced something like this. His first few times inside it went fine.”

It made sense: they hadn’t known about the Soldier’s activation triggers until Zemo had spoken them; Bucky himself hadn’t even known for sure that they were still rattling around the dark corners in his brain after he’d first broken free of the conditioning that day on the Potomac. He’d said he was always awakened from the machines and stuck in that chair, and after a process, then he was fully the Soldier—without always knowing how that had been achieved, and made to forget it when he did. They hadn’t wanted Bucky to know where the on/off switch was. God only knew what else was buried inside his mind, waiting to be detonated.

“It’s not your fault,” Steve said, putting his hand on Shuri’s arm. “You’re the only ones offering him hope, and I’m sure he thought this would be a solution. Even he doesn’t know everything they did to him.” He swallowed, his throat tight. “How do I help?” She’d called him here for a purpose, put the Wakandan delegation at risk if the State Department found out he and the team were in the US again. 

“Thank you, Captain.” With a ragged exhale, Shuri said, “I’ve developed a new interface that will allow two users within the same program at once, a—a 2.0, if you will. I was hoping you would be willing to come to Wakanda, enter the program, and find a way to bring him back.”

“Of course.” He was so accustomed to people knowing his history, that there was literally nothing in the world he wouldn’t do for Bucky or that he was afraid of, but she hadn’t been brought up with those stories. It was sort of refreshing to be treated like anyone else. “But I have to ask—why not you? You developed it, wouldn’t it be easier than teaching me how to do it?”

Shuri looked at her hands. “I know how arrogant this must sound… I’m not used to having something so significant go wrong. Even if he simply didn’t want to come out more than a few hours, if he was happier in the virtual world and more comfortable there, that could be all right if his body outside the program was all right. He would still have some control over his connection to reality, but this is perhaps like the way Hydra exerted control over him: his vital signs, his brain patterns are all altered. His physical body is endangered without any connection to this world.” When her eyes met his again, they were so sad it broke Steve’s heart. “And Sergeant Barnes doesn’t know me beyond our few meetings. Aside from the issue of whether he could trust me when he doesn’t really know me, if it’s a glitch from a conflict with Hydra’s programming, you might be the only person alive who could overcome it.”

“I see.” He could do this. If there was anyone he’d trust to make it possible and to keep them safe, it was Princess Shuri and the scientists in the Wakandan Design Group, their medical personnel. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for Bucky, nothing he hadn’t already been willing to do; this was as easy as falling off a log. “I just have one condition before you count me in—you have to promise to stop calling me _captain_.”

She gave him a watery smile. “I will if you stop calling me _highness_.”

“It’s a deal. How soon should we leave?”

“As quickly as possible.” That didn’t sound good at all.


	2. Recursus

Her mother was waiting when Shuri and Steve landed at the Citadel, dressed not quite as formally as she had been the first few times he had come to Wakanda. Maybe that meant she was getting used to him roaming around loose or something, and she didn’t feel as though she had to greet him quite the way she did the other visitors. Shuri’d tried to convince her to come with them to Oakland again, but after her first visit there, Mother had decided she preferred keeping an eye on her children over the internet to spending her days in such a “depressing” place. 

There was so much to do at home, she’d insisted, welcoming all the delegations making their first visits to Wakanda, representing her country at the African Union. “What better role for the Queen Mother,” she’d said, and honestly, Shuri got that—it hadn’t been till the center really started coming together that she’d been able to see something more hopeful in the place of what had once been hopeless and empty, where she hadn’t simply wanted to cry. 

Crying didn’t help anyone, least of all her brother and Nakia, so she’d buckled down and done the work. She kept it to herself, though, that sometimes she still wished that she could just be carefree and young in Wakanda, creating wondrous new toys and finding solutions to much more mundane problems. Wished she could have shown off her creations to Baba and T’Challa the way she had before, and then gone out with her school chums to a club and dance all night. Such thoughts felt selfish, however, now that she’d seen more of the world.

As they walked down to the platform, Shuri smiled at Steve. She’d felt a little smug on the ride home: Steve had seemed quite amazed at the jet, the way the Talons interacted with and responded to their pilots. Where she’d spent much of the flight time sleeping, he’d apparently been geeking out over the controls, enough that Indali and Ayo were very happy when he did finally nod off and left them alone, even though it didn’t last long. They would have to give him a chance to try it out. “Don’t worry—that won’t be the only time we take you for a ride,” Shuri said, which seemed to please him.

“Shuri,” Mother said, hugging her close. It felt so good to be in her arms again, so much more than she’d expected. This had been her longest stay in California; she’d stepped into a wider role, taking meetings with officials, doing some interviews with journalists, and overseeing presentations from different foundations that wanted to work with the center. “I am so glad you’re home. I hadn’t realized the captain wasn’t taking his own transportation here?” Mother said in Xhosa, so Steve wouldn’t feel offended.

“Mama, don’t,” Shuri answered in a low voice. “You sound like M’Baku.”

Her mother sighed and turned her attention to Steve, who crossed his arms over his chest. “Queen Ramonda,” he said in Xhosa, “thank you for allowing me to come along with Princess Shuri.”

“Ooo-ooo!” Shuri squealed in delighted surprise, switching to English. “Listen to you! You have either been studying behind my back or you memorized what you found on your kimoyo bead. That was very, very good.” She wondered if he’d understood what Mother had said to her or come up with that on his own. “You were not kidding when you said you have a facility for languages, if you did learn it.”

“Don’t worry—my abilities are embarrassingly rudimentary. You’ll have plenty of chances to mock me still.”

Just then, T’Challa came out, striding toward Steve with a smile on his face. “Welcome back,” he said to Steve, and they clasped forearms because that was the manly thing to do, and it made her want to laugh out loud. _Oh, just hug,_ she wanted to say. Still—she was glad that her brother was filling in a little of the emptiness W’Kabi had left in his heart through some new people, cultural differences aside.

Since it was just coming on evening, T’Challa offered to take Steve to his quarters so he could rest, and her mother hummed in agreement, adding, “You should sleep, and work on your problem tomorrow.” She wasn’t sure if Mother meant that for Steve or for her. 

But she wound her arm through Shuri’s and steered her in the direction of the palace halls, as T’Challa and Steve walked ahead, talking quietly with their heads lowered, and Ayo and Indali behind them. “But Mama, I should really check on Serg—” and Mother tugged on her arm.

“There is no need—he is being well taken care of, and his condition is unchanged.”

“But I haven’t seen him yet. And I know Steve would like to see him, there is no way he will sleep without seeing him.” 

Her mother gave her that long-suffering look, the one she’d perfected through all the times Shuri had run off with friends when she was supposed to be doing lessons or princess stuff. “It’s good of you to worry over others, my daughter,” she soothed, “you do it because you have a kind heart. But these men are not your pets.” Like she would treat them as stray puppies! What a thing to say. Shuri held her tongue, though, because even after all this time away she was not disrespectful. “It’s not for you to take care of them, especially at your own expense. You are working too hard and trying to do too much.” 

They headed in the direction of the residences, arm in arm, as Shuri explained what she’d been doing just before they’d left Oakland. It felt good, to lean against Mother, smell the fragrance she wore, listen to her reassuring, calm voice. Going to California might be a lifelong dream, but there was nothing like coming home. It was just after monsoon season in the north and you could smell it down here, that heavy, wet, ionized air, and if you listened you could hear the birds screeching in the highland forest that rose up behind the city. 

Her rooms hadn’t changed—they were just neater, and the Dora had already brought Shuri’s things in. Mother began to say to the attendant at the door, “Please have them send a light meal of—” but Shuri flapped her hand and interrupted with “I’m really not hungry, I ate many times on the trip.” Shuri wasn’t going to admit that much of that had been snacks her mother wouldn’t have approved of.

Mother gave her a speaking look, knowing her daughter’s tastes but letting it drop for now, and pushed her into the seat in front of the dressing table with its old-fashioned mirror, fussing at her hair. “Who is taking care of you?” she asked as Shuri swatted lightly at her. “Look at the condition of these braids.”

“Oh, Bashenga’s tears, Mama! It’s _fine_ ,” Shuri insisted. “I promise I will let you work on it later.”

“And your skin! So dry. You are sacrificing too much of yourself. Are you even taking the time to eat properly?” Mother continued as though Shuri hadn’t said anything, reaching for a jar of mango butter that had somehow conveniently made its way to the table though Shuri hadn’t been here in weeks.

“I take care of myself, Ayo makes me,” Shuri protested in a weak joke, because she had to admit this felt nice and she hadn’t made any time for pampering herself, let alone being pampered. There was also some coconut water that had magically appeared on the table and she sipped at it while her mother continued to dote on her. Her whole body was getting rubbery, letting go of some of the tension she’d had since she found out about Sergeant Barnes.

“This is not the same as making it part of your daily routine,” Mother said. “You cannot simply come home and make up for lack of care in one night.” She looked into Shuri’s eyes, warm and fond, and added, “It is the nature of young people, when they become adults, to chafe against their parents. Your father and I did to ours, and they did to theirs—it has always been this way. You have more things to rub against than most because of your position, and the traditions we impose. M’Baku believed we scoffed at traditions, but young people always challenge what went before. The important thing is that we keep the ones that count.”

Shuri frowned. “I am pretty certain there is a point that you’re making, which I am missing.”

“Your father is very, very proud of you for everything you have accomplished,” Mother said with a sly smile. “He has told me that many times. Even if he might have disagreed with your brother about all of this”—and she waved a hand toward the window, gesturing at all of world, which was hilarious to Shuri—“I know he is watching and _so very proud_ of his children for how they’ve chosen to create something new.” She put the lid on the jar and stood. “But you cannot bring him back by being so devoted to others that it means letting go of yourself completely. Now sleep. Tomorrow you can worry about the sergeant and the captain.”

At first, Shuri opened her mouth to protest, but then stopped herself because her mother was one of the wisest women she’d ever met, could see things few could see: she knew the ways of the priests and priestesses, the rites of all the different healers of all the tribes. If she was telling her that something should change, well, then…Shuri ought to listen to the meaning underneath the words. 

So Shuri let Mother help her change into sleep clothes and wrap her hair—okay, maybe Mother _was_ right, it could use a little help, but she wasn’t saying that out loud—and got ready for bed. Shuri’d gotten used to the accommodations in Oakland, the differences in all the little things, but there was nothing like sliding into her own familiar bed, the sounds and smells of her own familiar rooms, and her limbs felt heavy now, as did her eyelids. 

Mother kissed her forehead and smiled, gliding from the room with a quiet admonishment. “ _Try_ to rest a little before you throw yourself into this project and get lost again.”

“I will, Mama.” Pressing the bead for the lights, Shuri lay back, running her fingers over her much softer skin, her mind a million miles away from trying to sleep, though, and fixed instead on how she would build the module for training Steve to use Reverie.

* * *

“Princess Shuri said you were having some trouble at the western border?” Steve asked conversationally as T’Challa walked with him to his guest quarters. “Hopefully nothing too serious.” T’Challa really didn’t have to take the time; Steve’d been back a few times and had gotten the lay of the land reasonably quickly. Maybe T’Challa just enjoyed having some different company once in a while, now that so much of his time at home was spent in conferences or meeting with dignitaries or the Tribal Council. Steve also had the sense that T’Challa missed having a good fight now and then, and if the Black Panther got to suit up to handle an attempted security breach, well, all the better. 

“I think we will be facing it for some time,” he said, waving his bracelet at a sensor and opening the door to the rooms Steve always stayed in. “We have told people just enough to entice them to test us, to see what they can get away with. Eventually, they will understand that it does not work, and our presence in the world outside Wakanda will have less novelty.” 

“I doubt that may ever happen.” Steve grinned, though. “I do know a little of what that’s like. After word got out about me in the war, it seemed like everyone wanted a piece of me, not just the Red Skull. I think they believed they needed to test if I could even be real. They were usually pretty surprised when they got handed their asses.”

That made him laugh, which Steve always liked to see. T’Challa explained that the Border Tribe was now spread thin after the affair with Killmonger, many of them now under guard themselves for supporting T’Challa’s cousin. The country was focused on redemption for crimes rather than punishment, but it would be a long time until W’Kabi and the others were allowed to return to their former roles. 

Steve nodded to the king and dropped his duffel as they stepped inside, the Dora taking up stations at the door. It still felt strange to not have his shield with him; his hand always moved toward his back reflexively, and he’d catch himself going for it and then rub his neck a little, embarrassed.

The rooms were more of an outbuilding in the Citadel complex rather than part of the palace where the royal family lived, almost like a small, beautifully appointed cottage. The doors and windows opened on to a gorgeous private courtyard with a small pool fed by a waterfall running through the dense, humid garden. T’Challa said, “It is a long flight, even in the Talons, and there’s also the time difference and adjusting to the heat.” When Steve started to protest that he was fine, T’Challa held up a regal hand and said gently, “Sergeant Barnes is being well taken care of, I promise you. He’s not in immediate danger. I’ve seen the Reverie program and I think it would be wise to get some rest—it might be a little…taxing. Even for you.”

Steve’s eyebrow shot up; the words were meant to be reassuring, but it was like Shuri’s “as quickly as possible” in that it only made Steve more worried. But he assented, because it would be rude to do otherwise. T’Challa had a funny look on his face, kind and contemplative, maybe, like he knew all Steve was capable of thinking about was Bucky, and not for the first time Steve wondered how much other people guessed of his feelings for him. 

T’Challa had a conference with a prime minister in a different time zone, so he told Steve he’d come in the morning to take him up to the Design Group. On his first visit back to the country, T’Challa had taken him up there on foot, giving him a chance to see the beauty of the land around the mountain—and maybe he’d been feeling Steve out just a little, trying to get the measure of him, and certainly there were few people with a stamina that could match his own. But now on his visits Steve took the little planes or the hoverbikes, because the king was so busy. Steve thought T’Challa might be lonely these days, being apart from his family so much now, Nakia often being in different parts of the world, too. And he missed his father still so very much, a grief that was hard to shake, Steve knew. They clasped forearms, and with an apologetic smile, T’Challa left.

Steve opened the doors and stepped out into the courtyard. The most startlingly blue bird he’d ever seen shot up from the foliage and took position in a towering tree, glaring down at Steve. It had a brilliant red crown and a long tail, very regal and quite different from the duller partridge-like birds poking around in the underbrush, who didn’t seem as perturbed by his presence. Steve apologized for interrupting, pulled out his phone, and sat down to text Sam about his arrival. It was still yesterday where they were. Life was a constant series of adjustments now, bouncing among time zones as though they were short-term time travelers, staying in places with no differentiation, so you felt like you lived inside an underexposed photograph. Jet lag hadn’t even existed when Steve took the Valkyrie into the water; now it was the one overarching characteristic of his life. 

It wasn’t sustainable, he knew, not for Sam and Nat and Wanda, not even for himself; even nomads settled down for a little while occasionally. All he’d wanted was a home, and yet here he was now, perpetually on the run, running near to empty. He had to work harder all the time to push his own losses into the background, to not want to throw in the towel on…whatever it was they were doing now, just so he could stay in one place that he could call home—but there wasn’t space for him to get maudlin about losing the Avengers, about losing Peggy and that last connection to a vague concept of where he belonged. There was only work to be done.

If he’d had Bucky with him, though, none of that would have mattered. Steve would have had everything that counted. Bucky had always been home, anyway.

The bird flapped down to a stone wall and cocked its head at him. “Sorry, bud,” Steve said, holding out a hand, “I’m afraid I don’t have any food for you. I’ll leave you to get back to what you were doing.” He took his boots off and lay down on the bed, trying to will himself to relax, but his body was too tightly strung, thinking about Bucky. Despite Shuri’s explanations on the trip, it still felt maddeningly vague and slightly incomprehensible. He just wanted to see what he was up against.

After lying there for a good long while, Steve huffed in exasperation and got up, went to the bathroom and washed up a little before trying again to relax and sleep. But that still accomplished nothing, and by now the sky was dark. He put on a fresh T-shirt and jeans, grabbed a baseball cap, and stepped out into the breezeway, where his Dora Milaje guard was standing at attention. He held his hands up. “I can’t seem to relax. Thought I might just walk around the city for a little while till I could feel tired.” The heat alone usually knocked him flat when he first returned.

“I’m called Wanuri. Allow me to send for a sedative tea,” she said. “It is very effective.”

He shook his head. “It’s nothing a little walking won’t cure,” he said. “I’m all right on my own, I know the way.”

She gave him an arch look, like she was insulted by his attempt to get rid of her. “This is my duty.”

“Right. Okay, then.” He let her walk ahead to lead him out past the landing area to the entrance of the Citadel grounds, flanked by its huge panther statues, where she then dropped back, as unobtrusive as possible considering she was a Dora Milaje. They followed the main road stretching to the heart of the northwest part of the city, which sprawled around the Citadel and the neighborhoods that climbed up the hillsides. Market stalls had closed up now so the streets were the province of young people heading from food stands and cafes to nightclubs and bars, couples walking hand in hand to restaurants or performances; Steve felt a kind of energy even from far away, a buzz that grew more distinct the closer he got to the main streets. 

Whenever he walked around Birnin Zana—by himself or with a member of the royal family—he half expected someone to point an accusatory finger at him and call him out for what had happened in Lagos. They never did, of course, at least no one had yet, but he wasn’t deluding himself that it couldn’t happen, that someone whose family member had died in the accident wasn’t going to confront him and demand he pay for the crime. No matter what the royal family said now about their forgiveness, King T’Chaka’s words echoed in the back of Steve’s mind: “Victory at the expense of the innocent is no victory at all.” As much as he had come to love this place, what had brought him here was a tragedy no one should forget.

But Wakanda was growing used to outsiders—on their first few visits, people had kept a friendly but slightly wary distance from him and the team, but reception had grown friendlier after the decision to open the country up. Tonight, he wasn’t even remarked on as he threaded his way through the crowds. Despite the country’s isolation, most people, at least in the cities, grew up learning another language, usually English but sometimes French, and they threw him a “hello” as he walked past. 

While it was dark, the city was bright with the omnipresent faint purple or bluish glow of vibranium light: on the hover-tram cars, the street lamps, from people’s kimoyo bracelets, all punctuated by neon signs. It enhanced the otherworldly feel of the city, gave him a sensation akin to waking in the future that he’d had back in 2011: everything was familiar, but not. 

The aromas of cooking food surrounded Steve, bringing his stomach awake. He hadn’t eaten much on the plane, he realized now, so he stopped at a grilled meat stand whose smoke was making his mouth water. The woman cooking had a couple of sweet-smelling blooms tucked in among the twists of her hair, fragrant even above the smoke, and she asked him what he wanted as though he were Wakandan himself and not an obvious outsider. He was pretty sure most of it was goat; Sam had laughed his ass off at Steve’s displeasure when he’d tried it the first time, because Sam had developed a taste for it in Afghanistan, he’d claimed, but to Steve it was too close to the cheap mutton that was all they could afford much of the time growing up. 

Steve asked what she had cooking and she laughed, like she could tell he was afraid of her answer, but she pointed at some of the skewers and said, “Chicken,” so he smiled and held up two fingers, saying, “It looks wonderful.” He didn’t know if there was a formal name for the dish, but he loved the intense, bright spices and the sauce that accompanied it, and she added some red rice and a spongey bread that reminded him of injera. Possibly it _was_ injera—Ethiopia was the one other African nation that hadn’t been colonized, and the two places shared some interesting similarities, possibly developed over centuries of trade when Wakanda hadn’t been quite as closed off. He offered to get some food for Wanuri, but she begged off.

“Sit, please,” the woman told him, waving a hand at the little tables scattered nearby, “enjoy.” Somehow there was always Wakandan money on his kimoyo bead—he thought some poor functionary in the palace must be tasked with topping it up every time he came back to the country—and he pulled it from under his shirt and pointed it at the little reader on her stand. He motioned to Wanuri to join him. She looked reluctant, of course, but eventually angled her spear against the other chair and sat, ramrod straight, humoring him. 

“Don’t eat on duty?” Steve asked.

A shake of the head. “If I were hungry, I would join you.” 

With a smile, he said, somewhat sheepishly, “I hadn’t realized how hungry I actually was. The past thirty-six hours have been a bit…wild.” He took a sip of the fizzy tamarind drink he’d bought. “I keep forgetting, every time I come back here, how long it takes me to adjust to the elevation and the heat. Seems to work up an appetite, and maybe that’s why I can’t sleep.”

She gave him a kind smile. “There are also many things weighing on your mind.”

It made him chuckle. “Got that from General Okoye’s daily briefing, did you?”

He was startled that he’d actually made her laugh. “It is easiest to do our jobs when we know what our guests are doing.”

“I’ve never been able to convince them that I’m pretty good at taking care of myself.” He finished eating as she kept an unnecessarily watchful eye, and then he got up to stroll around a little more. Outside one cafe he stopped to listen to the music filtering from inside, enjoying the beat even though he couldn’t hear a lot else, and caught Wanuri’s amused smile again. “Don’t expect the foreigner to appreciate Wakandan music?” he teased.

Shaking her head, she said, “It is more that you’re close to one hundred years old.”

He belted out a laugh, causing some passersby to cast curious glances. “Only by a technicality.” They wandered idly a little while longer, occasionally stopping so she might explain something he was curious about, before he decided it would be best to head back up to the Palace. He was hoping they’d get an early start in the morning—the faster he learned how to use Reverie, the faster he could get Bucky out.

But despite his best efforts, he still couldn’t sleep, and after flopping around like a landed fish, turning on the television and trying to find something mindless, and attempting to read, Steve gave up and pulled up the Citadel’s grounds schematic on the glass tablet in his room. Shuri had said that Bucky’d been taken out of cryosleep up at the medical labs where he’d gone under, but after that had moved down to his own quarters within the complex while he used Reverie. They’d brought him to the medical facility attached to the Citadel a few days before their arrival. Steve sent the path to his bead, poked his head out the door, and told Wanuri apologetically, “Still can’t sleep. I think I’m going over to look in on my friend. Really, I can find the way myself.” He held the bead up as proof.

“I will lead you there.” Tough crowd. 

Wanuri led him through the soft, cool gray of the hallways to an area with patient rooms, spacious and open, where a nurse was attending to something outside Bucky’s room. The walls were the glass ones saw everywhere, controllable by voice commands, and the artistic patterns on the floors and walls were more subdued here. Steve stopped, staring at Bucky in the bed, an arched panel behind him bearing lighted symbols that changed color every few seconds—probably blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen…the usual vitals. The nurse obviously knew who Steve was, and she cast a glance out to the hall at Wanuri, where some unspoken communication between them occurred. She came toward him with an understanding smile, then opened the glass door into Bucky’s room with a wave of her hand; he went in, his heart pounding. 

It had been months since Steve had seen Bucky beyond images of his sleeping form, glimpses in a lab behind glass walls, and he found it strange and distressing and exhilarating all at once. “Captain Rogers, please sit,” the nurse said kindly, pulling a chair over beside the bed before leaving him alone.

“Well, this is another fine mess you’ve got us into,” Steve said, wrapping his fingers around Bucky’s hand, pressing his thumb to the pulse that beat softly under the skin of his wrist. There was no glass in between them anymore, he could touch Bucky and see the way the air stirred the fine hairs along his neck, and he’d never seemed more beautiful to Steve, save the time he’d found him alive in Austria against all hope. “I don’t know if you can hear me, Buck, but Shuri tells me things have gone wrong in there and you’re having a little trouble getting back out. So I came to help.”

He wasn’t sure what he’d hoped for, maybe that the readings would beep and Bucky’s eyes would flutter open at the sound of his voice, or maybe that he’d squeeze Steve’s hand to let him know he’d heard. But none of that happened; nothing happened, as far as he could tell, and the nurse didn’t move from her position across the hall.

“I’m gonna learn how to use the same program and join you in there. So you’ll be seeing me, and you won’t be able to get rid of me till you decide to come on back out. I got you out of the Winter Soldier, I’m pretty sure I can do this.” He laughed softly. “I suppose that sounds cocky, but you know me. I love a good challenge. This is—well, I’m not giving up on this one.” Colonel Phillips had told Steve Bucky was most likely dead in Austria, Sam had said Bucky was the kind you couldn’t save. He was going for three for three now, and he wouldn’t lose.

Still no sign of life. That was okay, Steve could stay here a while. For Bucky, Steve could do anything.

* * *

“He’ll want to try to fly,” Shuri said to herself, “because who wouldn’t. So that’s one thing.” She’d been compiling a mental list of all the things she’d have to address with Steve in the morning, and it was now two hours since she’d last got out of bed and paced restlessly before getting back in and trying to sleep, and she was no closer than before. The reason she couldn’t sleep wasn’t because she’d napped a little on the trip, she was just anxious about the way this would go, and frustrated that they couldn’t have started as soon as they’d landed. 

With a final huff, Shuri threw her blanket off and got up. She could drink some silverfern tea and try again, but it wasn’t that long till sunrise at this point, anyway. She put on some leggings and her Oakland A’s T-shirt, a gift from her favorite student at the center—she just needed to see where Sergeant Barnes was, what things looked like for him. Make sure he was all right. Everything had been so good when she’d left for the US. How had it gone so wrong as soon as she’d left?

“It’s all right,” she told the Dora guard, “I’m only going over to the medical complex.” Of course she started to protest, but Shuri just waved her back. In the hallway outside the sergeant’s room, she spotted Wanuri, standing farther back from the patient areas, and then she saw Steve inside, sitting next to Sergeant Barnes. “Oh,” she exclaimed. Shuri stepped back into the dark wedge of shadow, looking through into the room. The nurse who would be here, Oni, was not anywhere Shuri could see. Everything seemed all right, though, the sergeant didn’t appear to be in any danger, but from the look on Steve’s face you would think Barnes was on his deathbed. Steve’s hand covered the sergeant’s, and he was talking softly to him, probably hoping his friend could hear him.

For a while, Shuri watched in silence, until she decided to leave, and as she turned to go, she found T’Challa there, a wry smile on his face.

“Apparently, no one can sleep tonight and we have all decided to come stare at Barnes,” he said.

“Like the bunch of weirdos that we are.” She sighed, feeling like an idiot. “I just couldn’t stop thinking of what I need to do, and whether it will work, and what he—”

Her brother shook his head. “Don’t let yourself obsess about those things. This is not your fault, how many times must we say that?”

“I know that in my head, but my heart is not listening.”

Her mind wouldn’t quit whirling with all the possibilities of what she’d missed, what could be happening inside Barnes, how they could fix it, and never coming up with any answers. She could feel her throat getting tighter, the tears warm behind her eyes.

“Mother says I am trying to bring Baba back by helping all these men. But I don’t think that’s it.” The tears spilled over, and she wiped at her eyes, sniffling. T’Challa pulled the sleeve of his tunic tight and dabbed at her cheeks. 

“It might be, a little,” he said tenderly. “But it is also that you have a kind and generous heart.”

She glanced over at Bucky, and whispered intensely, “ _It’s also because I helped you find him._ It’s because of me that you were there at all, and perhaps Steve would have got Barnes out of there safely and you would not have almost killed—” and she choked off the words on a hiccuping breath, wiping at her eyes again. “I shouldn’t have done it, but I just hurt for Baba, so much.”

T’Challa took her face in his hands. “Stop that. Stop. I am the one who asked you to find him, those were my mistakes—and that’s why they are here. They know you are trying to help.” He wiped her tears away and took her hand in his. Yes, Steve’s guilt over Lagos was every bit as acute as what she felt about Barnes, but knowing that didn’t change a thing. None of this would have happened if she’d said no to T’Challa, reasoned with him to not do something he’d regret. They were quiet for a while, leaning against one another.

Once she’d stopped sniffling so much, she said softly, “I think that he is in love with Sergeant Barnes.”

T’Challa’s eyebrow went up, the corner of his mouth tugged up too. “Possibly, but that is none of our business. Our only concern right now is to find out what’s gone wrong with Barnes and to help Captain Rogers help him.” He was right, of course, her brother was usually right.

“Steve,” Shuri corrected quietly, squeezing her brother’s hand tighter. “He prefers to be called Steve.”


	3. Cognosco

T’Challa arrived promptly in the morning, just as he’d said, and despite the lack of sleep and the jet lag, Steve was ready and eager to get started. First, though, was taking time for the breakfast the king had brought, and then they went off with his Dora Milaje retinue to Mount Bashenga and the Design Group lab. Steve could tell from the almost imperceptible way his demeanor shifted that T’Challa missed being here in his own little corner, tinkering with things. “I will leave you to my sister’s devices,” T’Challa said with a frightening grin, “and attend to a few duties. If she is not done with you by afternoon, I will send out search and rescue.”

The lab rooms were just as he remembered them from his visits to see Bucky in limbo behind the cryo chamber doors, but Ayo took him to a different part of the building, deeper into the mountain, where Shuri was waiting for him. This wing almost looked like offices, in a way, less researchy and more like the design of the Outreach Center: smaller rooms with glass walls, computer stations, chairs, nooks for sitting and doing work in or having meetings.

There was a glass tank in one corner of the room they entered, like some sort of hi-tech aquarium. It held one lone occupant: a tiny round white orb with a black dot in the center, anchored to the bottom by a squiggly tail, pulsing gently in the liquid. Steve had to bite back a laugh, because it looked something like a microscopic balloon but also—and he wasn’t saying this out loud—a very round sperm. So he cleared his throat and said, “I take it this is the, what’d you call it, the bio-computer interface?”

“Yes, this is it,” Shuri said, as a tall man wearing a white lab coat came up alongside her. Not all the medical personnel wore coats the way medical people back home did, but many tended to, something that had surprised Steve a little bit in those first few days in Wakanda, when they were trying to stabilize the damage to Bucky’s metal arm and heal a few of Steve’s own injuries. It had seemed very Western, but he’d learned that Wakanda’s isolation didn’t always mean completely ignoring the customs of the world around them. “This is N’Deme, a neuroscientist, who helped design the brain interface.”

“Doctor, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” They shook hands.

“Please, N’Deme will do.” 

“Here’s hoping I can figure this thing out quickly and get Bucky back out.”

“I am sure of it, Captain.” He waved a hand toward the tank. “It does not look like much, but that is a very powerful chip in there.”

“You will have to get the implant first.” Shuri wrinkled her nose and pointed at a small tray of implements next to a reclining chair, the largest of which was a gun that reminded him of one of those video game things you used for first-person shooters. “It is much scarier than it looks.” 

Steve knew this drill, and slid into the seat, getting comfortable and turning his elbow around on the chair arm so he could offer up a vein. “This doesn’t even faze me. You should have seen what they stuck in me to get this”—and he motioned at his torso—“back in the day. To say nothing of the oven they cooked me in with Vita-Rays.”

“If you say so,” Shuri said with smirk, picking up the gun and pressing a button—a very long needle shot out. She poked it into a membrane, breaking the rubbery seal with the needle and drawing the little thing up inside; it detached from its wiggly tail and disappeared. The needle must have been more for pulling the thing into the gun than pushing it inside something else, because he never felt even the slightest of pricks, just heard a little “fwoop” and then Shuri set the gun back on the table. “Brave boy,” she said with a grin, patting his shoulder. 

“Do I get a cookie, then? I feel like I should get a cookie.”

“Hm.” Shuri made a thoughtful face. “I should see what I have stashed away from Oakland.” 

“I mean, I’ve never had a computer injected into me before. Especially one that’ll attach itself to my brain.”

“Well then, you deserve your cookie, I suppose.” She leaned toward him and said conspiratorially, “I think I am becoming addicted to those Biscoff cookies. I have some about somewhere.”

“I’ll take ’em. They didn’t give me anything back in the war, you know,” he said, pretending to be sad.

“No, only a superior new body, good health, and the ability to survive being frozen for seventy years.”

Steve enjoyed her sarcasm. One of his favorite things he’d discovered here was how little…well, reverence wasn’t the right word, but maybe formality, there was generally, and how much delight they took in teasing each other. His friends and family regularly seemed to roast T’Challa, as Sam put it, and everyone, especially Shuri, showed a remarkable ability to mix respect and tradition with impertinence to anyone, regardless of their role. It made Steve feel more at home here than almost anything else could; if he couldn’t have Bucky, Nat, or Sam around to flip him shit, he was grateful to have the Wakandans.

N’Deme wasn’t letting himself be distracted by their banter and held his kimoyo bracelet near Steve, moving it up along the curve of Steve’s arm. A small holographic image projected in front of the bracelet showing the BCI’s dot traveling up through a color-coded system of veins. It was fascinating, but it also made him think of Tony, who’d have been bouncing up and down over this tech like a kid at Christmas, and that sense of sorrow for what he’d so recently lost passed through Steve again. 

But that was a long time ago. He shook his head and looked at Shuri.

“I will set up the module and see how many cookies I am willing to share,” Shuri said, patting his head and disappearing around the corner, while N’Deme continued to monitor the BCI’s path toward his brain. He suppose he should feel a little apprehensive about this, but he didn’t—Steve always liked being at the Design Group, with its beautiful patterns everywhere and artwork and bold, printed textiles, the gleaming glass surfaces, and the fantastical shapes of the modeling sand for various weird projects scattered about. It was nothing like Howard’s labs in the war and yet it made Steve feel safe, somehow, comfortable in its familiarity.

He was lost in studying the room’s intricate artwork when N’Deme said, very pleased, “There we are.” Was Steve supposed to have felt something when it attached? He hadn’t, he wouldn’t know that anything had happened at all, in fact, and he rubbed his arm where the thing had gone in—not even the tiniest of marks. “Let me enter in the data,” N’Deme said, so Steve got up and wandered into the large open area between the primary labs and these rooms. 

On one of its huge glass walls was a beautiful, elaborate piece of video art—or no, it was a mandala, Steve recalled. It swirled and morphed like an orange, yellow, and pink kaleidoscope, and he found himself somewhat hypnotized. 

N’Deme came up beside him. “Mandalas are meant to represent the universe.”

“It’s beautiful. Is it here as art, or…”

“It is a part of the program. A gateway icon that allows you to exit back to the real world. You will find it showing up in many places: a window, a door handle, a mirror or clock…any place you can use it to return here.”

“Good choice. My eye will go straight to it.”

With a chuckle, he said, “One hopes. Of course it won’t be that large.” He motioned for Steve to follow him. “Princess Shuri and I have built your cortical interface using your SHIELD medical files. Things may have changed since your last evaluation there, but I think for the most part, it will be fine. While you are using the training module, I will monitor your vital signs—the program was designed so that users would choose from a prebuilt interface and then add their own experiences, desires, and interests as they went along, building their perfect universe. But Sergeant Barnes did not have much to build from—few photos of himself in his previous life, no online or recorded history to download into it, beyond some of the newsreels from the war. We took most of his interface from the books written about you both, and tried to avoid anything regarding Hydra or the Winter Soldier.” 

They went into a large room with multiple stations that looked like futuristic computer terminals, holoscreens projecting in the air above them, and glossy black tables with lighted holographic keyboards, like Tony’s interfaces back home. A couple of chaise longue-type chairs were scattered about, and N’Deme motioned to one. “Please, make yourself comfortable and I will set this up for the princess.”

N’Deme swept his bracelet over one of the stations, where a purple light glowed beneath the surface, picking up the data from his scan of Steve’s body, he surmised. “All right,” Shuri said as she came in, holding a large glass pane with two rubber grips on either side, “here we go.” She pulled up a chair next to him as he leaned back. “No cookies here, but I’ve sent out for some treats for you.”

“Thanks,” Steve said.

“So, since the sergeant didn’t have much history to build his Reverie from, he created most of it himself on his own time, which means we don’t really know what will be in there. But you, on the other hand, oh my, are you famous!” This appeared to delight her. “I will put so many Easter eggs in your program.”

“Yikes.”

“It will be fun, I promise. But for now, this first one is kind of standard, with some things you will recognize to help orient you faster.” She set the glass on her lap and asked, “What is your favorite memory?”

That was such a complicated question, especially since so many of his most meaningful moments were with Bucky, or because of Bucky. And then there was Peggy, and the people he was closest to in this century… He wasn’t certain he could really share what he held most dear, so he picked something generic. “The first night game at Ebbets Field, June 1938.”

“Tell me all about it,” Shuri prompted, as she began typing things on the glass.

“Uh, well. There hadn’t been many other night games anywhere yet at that point and none in New York, so people were skeptical—it drew a huge crowd because they wanted to see how the players would perform, I think they hoped it’d be a fiasco. We—Bucky and I, I mean—were way up in the stands, far enough away that we couldn’t really see Jesse Owens racing with some of the players in a little pregame show. But when the lights came on, it was just—spectacular, it seemed so futuristic at the time. We lost, of course—the Dodgers—though the Reds’ pitcher made history that night by being the first fella to pitch two no-hit, no-run games in a row. So the fans spilled onto the field afterward and I almost got trampled in the crowd. It was worth it, to be a part of history like that.”

After a minute, Shuri looked up from the tablet. “Okay, I understood some of those words individually, but not the way you put them together in that order.” He laughed. “I have an Oakland A’s shirt, though, so I do know what baseball is.”

“It’s a start.”

Shuri handed the tablet to him and turned to N’Deme, who nodded that they were ready. She took a deep breath. “You enter the program by holding this device, this one’s now yours. Do you want to use English for ‘open,’ or Xhosa, now that you are so fluent”—he gave her a look and she smirked—“or even something else like, I don’t know, French, Latin?”

She was teasing, but he thought that sounded funny, so he said, “Yeah, why not Latin?”

Touching something on a projection from one of her beads, she said, “Okay, then, Latin.” 

“Once I’m in there, do I just…I don’t know, walk around?” Steve was attempting to race out in front of them, he realized, instead of giving them the chance to go over it step by step, but he was thrumming with energy now that things were really moving. Bucky had always given him a hard time about that: he’d often chastised Steve for finishing people’s sentences if he thought they weren’t speaking fast enough, or snapping at those Steve felt weren’t keeping up with his thought processes.

“Your brain tells your limbs what to do,” N’Deme said from his station, “and those signals are connected to your body in Reverie. Other than a few stray reactions to powerful stimuli, your body will remain perfectly still here in this seat while you do walk around.”

“So…I could theoretically do anything I want?”

“Physical laws don’t necessarily apply, but they will be subject to the limitations of the code,” he explained, as though Steve would understand.

“You cannot just take off and fly,” Shuri interjected. “Not yet, anyway.” Her eyes scrunched up a little. “Humans don’t really have the mental understanding needed to fly, so it’s not a thing that would work for most of us. But perhaps Mr. Wilson can give us information we could use to build that into Reverie in a way it might work for regular users.”

Now that she mentioned it, Steve really wanted to try to fly on his own. He’d been carried enough times by Sam or even by Tony that it would drive him crazy if he couldn’t be the one to do it on his own in a virtual reality world. Still—eyes on the prize. “Disappointing, but okay. So, can I get hurt, is that why I shouldn’t try to fly?”

“You can teach yourself to disarm certain triggers, like pain, for example,” N’Deme said. “Over time, you might learn to override your natural instincts and deprogram your fear response.” It sounded, though, like that might be time they didn’t have. 

She picked the tablet up again and tapped it. “You hold up this device and say ‘apertus,’ and that will take you inside, and there you’ll find yourself in the box.”

“The box. Sounds ominous.”

“It’s not, not for a brave boy like you.” She cackled at his sour face. “It’s just where the training module really begins. Once inside, there is no way to communicate with us out here. So when you’re ready to come back or if it gets too intense, look for the gateway icon—”

“The mandala,” Steve cut in.

“Yes, but if you can’t find one or you simply wish to leave, at any time you should just say ‘exitus’ and you’ll be right back here. This first run is very simple.”

“How many are you planning?”

With a deep breath, Shuri said, “It depends on how you pick it up. When you finish training, there’s a treat. Better than a cookie.”

Huffing a laugh, Steve held the Reverie tablet up. On its face were multiple little boxes containing text and some stock-type photos, a few Wakandan symbols alongside the boxes, and the readouts of his vital statistics with other text about himself; in the center top was a pulsing, swirling mandala of purple and blue. Behind the glass panel, Shuri’s tangerine tunic and trousers made a brilliant backdrop. “Here goes nothin’,” Steve said and took a deep breath. “Apertus.”

When he opened his eyes, he was lying on his back in the jungle, birds shrieking in the canopy high above him. Tropical flowers scented the air, and he smiled, sat up, and looked around. Shuri hadn’t been kidding: there was nothing about this that felt fake, the humid, thick air and the feel of the damp soil and vegetation under his hands were as real as the chair and cool office air had been before he said ‘apertus.’ Steve stood up, taking a few tentative steps, absorbing the sensations—a slight breeze across his skin, the dappled light flickering past his vision. His feet did exactly what he told them to, his hands moved in front of his face just the way he wanted, his eyes blinked—everything worked. With a deep breath, he set off, stepping through the bush, feeling the sunshine that filtered through the trees. Parrots and other brilliant birds zoomed through the air. “Wow,” he said aloud, turning around and around. 

A few feet in front of where Steve stood was a tree stump, and on top of it a small fire burned, sending embers up into the air. It seemed too random to just be background, so he decided it had to be a test. Steve focused his mind, thinking of what N’Deme had said about overcoming his fear response, and he stepped forward, tentatively stretching his hand out. _It’s not real. I won’t feel pain because it’s not my real body._ He stuck his hand all the way inside the flames, but nothing happened, and he closed his fist, turning it around and around as the flames curved over his flesh. With a chuckle, he took his hand out, looking at his untouched skin. But then the whole canopy of the jungle burst into flames and Steve drew his head back, startled. Was it reacting to him sticking his hand in the fire, some kind of weird displaced result of what he’d done? He turned and ran in the other direction, starting slow and then running faster and faster, crashing through the understory.

In the distance came the sound of rushing water, so he oriented his trajectory till he found himself running right through the jungle to the edge of a river. Just as he pulled up to the bank, his footsteps took him inside an iron box, barely big enough for him at only a few meters wide, and a door clanged shut behind him. Steve tried it, bashed at it with his fists, but it didn’t open. _Shit._ It was almost pitch black in here. He wasn’t entirely sure this was “the box” she’d referred to, because Shuri’d said that was where you entered the program and he’d already been in it for a few minutes now. But it sure as hell was a literal box. The floor was a metal grid; underneath, water began to rise, faster and faster, flowing over the grid and filling the box. Bracing his hands awkwardly against the sides, Steve lifted himself up and kicked out, certain he could knock the wall out by brute force alone, but it held fast, the water almost to his waist now. “God dammit,” he barked as he looked for a weakness and the water rushed up, covering his chin. 

_Right._ This was meant to invoke a fear response, to panic him. So he took one last deep breath as the water covered his head, looking for the gateway somewhere within the dark iron cage, but he couldn’t find it. Steve pressed his hand to the wall and said, taking in water, “Exitus.”

Sucking in deep, ragged breaths, Steve clutched at the sides of the chair, trying to remind himself he could breathe, that he wasn’t drowning. Shuri’s face loomed in his field of vision, eyebrows up. “Intense, yeah?”

 _Holy shit._ She had not exaggerated when she said it was nearly indistinguishable from reality. It was nothing like he’d seen in Tony’s program, he’d felt the water going into his lungs, just like when he’d taken the Valkyrie down. 

N’Deme came over beside Shuri and tried to reassure him. “All your vital signs are good. You are all right.”

Steve wiped his hand over his eyes, working on getting his heart rate down. “I thought I was drowning again.”

A look of horror came over Shuri’s face and she put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, Bast’s heart. I cannot believe I didn’t think of that. I...”

Steve’s hand closed gently over her arm, and N’Deme glanced between the two of them, confused. With a slight shake of his head, he closed his eyes for a second. “No, it’s okay. I have to be able to control my responses in there, expect the unexpected, since it’s Bucky’s reverie. And you don’t have a responsibility to remember every detail of my untimely demise.” He’d hoped to get a laugh out of her to soothe her distress, but she only looked more upset. “It was seventy years ago to the rest of the world, Princess. It’s only me who feels like it’s seven.”

She offered him a weak smile and put her hand over his. “We should take a break, I think. Let me rebuild some of the simulations to be less…awful. I am so sorry, Steve. Please forgive me.”

At least she hadn’t stopped calling him by his first name. As kindly as he could, Steve said, “Hey, at least the water was warm.”

But her tiny laugh was only pretend. “Maybe eat something for lunch, and then I should have the battery of testing modules redone.”

He shrugged. “I’m not that hungry, to be honest. But I’ll give you some time.” It would have been nice for Sam or Nat to be here, to joke around with him and make him feel less like Bucky’s entire life didn’t hinge on his dodgy performance right now.

“Come,” N’Deme said, “I’ll show you where to go. I, at least, am hungry and you may keep me company.”

The area N’Deme took him to reminded Steve a little of the common areas of the tower and the upstate compound the Avengers had used. It was wide and comfortable with full kitchen facilities, and lots of places for relaxing for the people who worked in the labs. You didn’t really feel like you were underground in the bright, colorful space, and at one of the tables sat a few men and women, sharing some food and red tea, who switched their conversation to English when N’Deme introduced Steve and they joined them. It was kind of them, but Steve wanted to tell them to continue in Xhosa, so he could have a polite reason to tune everything out. 

He pretended to listen to the conversation, which sounded like it was about the design and implementation issues of the high-speed rail they were hoping to build with a few neighboring countries, allowing easier access as Wakanda slowly widened its welcome to outsiders. Wakanda had never needed an international airport, and building one now was a very complicated issue, one that would take a long time to decide, T’Challa had told Steve. Delegations went to other countries first and were brought in by Wakandan shuttle planes with their ability to do vertical takeoff and landing. 

There had once been an airfield, T’Challa had also said, a small thing out on the plains toward the southern border, but it had gone away once Wakanda created their first Talon jets. It fascinated Steve that previous Black Panthers had been flying around the continent at one time, superheroing. That was when he’d found out that T’Challa’s great-grandfather had sold vibranium to a number of countries as a way to create Wakanda’s university and offer free education for every citizen. 

Which was how Howard Stark had come to have just enough to create Steve’s shield.

“I’d always assumed that it was just…I don’t know, ill-gotten gains or something,” Steve had said. “Stolen, like so many things had been stolen from the continent.” _That’s the rarest metal on earth. What you’re holding right there? That’s all we got._

“They didn’t fully appreciate it enough to steal, to see that its value could extend beyond its rarity,” T’Challa had said with a laugh. “The world was more focused on what it had already valued: platinum, gold, diamonds, and such. Which was to our benefit—vibranium’s strangeness and difficulty meant all those governments treated it first as a curiosity and then mostly ignored it when they found it hard to work with, but a few wanted more to see what they could do. Stark was possibly the one scientist who understood its properties and true value. He and my grandfather had a brief correspondence about it, in fact. You see, you and Tony Stark had connections to Wakanda long before our encounter in Europe.”

Steve had been utterly astonished; Howard had never shared any of that history with him—or Tony, possibly, either. “Wait—did your great-grandfather give some to South Africa? Was that how Ulysses Klaue found out about it?”

T’Challa had looked not a little sad. “Not to their government directly, but the territory that is now Lesotho.” And then he’d asked, “You miss it, don’t you? Your vibranium shield.”

At first, Steve had wanted to deny it, but he couldn’t. “Yes. It has…a lot of memories for me.”

Abruptly, Steve realized the conversation at the table had quieted while he was reminiscing. They were polite enough to try to re-engage him and he played along until he could respectfully excuse himself. He went out to a large open area with an entire wall that showed a feed of the plains to the north of the labs and to the mountains that rose up farther behind that, their peaks still dusted with snow. 

It had been a very long time since Steve had been as taken by surprise as he had when he’d felt like he was drowning. He watched the peaceful view on the screen, drawing in a deep breath. For just long enough he’d forgotten their instructions of how to leave the program and when he couldn’t find a mandala, he’d panicked. After the serum, he’d always been in control of his body and his physical responses, even when he’d driven that plane into the water. He’d been in control except twice: when he’d been unable to save Bucky on the train, and when he’d let Rumlow detonate the explosion and watched helplessly as Wanda sent it ripping through the building in Lagos. Every time his responses got the better of him, it went right back to Bucky.

Whatever the next training modules were, he had to regain his self-control, because Bucky’s life depended on it. 

On his kimoyo bead, Steve pulled up the image of Bucky in his hospital bed and watched it for a while, reminding himself that this was what he was fighting for.

As if she knew what he was thinking about, Shuri came up next to him and said, “I should not have been so careless.”

He pressed his lips together in a tight line. “Really, it’s all right. I’m all right. Maybe I just hadn’t realized how many things like that I’ve still got rattling around in the cage, you know?” and he tapped his temple.

“You can wait until tomorrow to run the rest of the training simulations. Sergeant Barnes is doing okay, his vitals are all still holding well.”

Steve shook his head. “I want to make sure I’m ready for anything, because who knows what his program could throw at me.”

“The sergeant would—”

“Would hate it if you called him that. He was… Well, he wouldn’t want people to still call him Sergeant Barnes. He was always just Bucky.”

She rolled her eyes. “You two.”

“You’re not the first person to say that.”

“Well, when he’s back with us, then I will bring it up with him.”

“Fair enough.” He put his hand on her shoulder and they headed back to the room. “So, you ready to put me back in the box?”

Her mouth twisted up, she looked stricken. “There are so many other test runs, you don’t need that specific example...”

“Now that I know what to expect, I’m fine. It was just momentary surprise, an unfamiliar environment. Trying it again will help me prepare for everything, right?”

“I suppose.” Shuri wasn’t convinced, but she picked up her glass panel and typed in some things. “We don’t need to wait for N’Deme, he is making some other adjustments to the program. And if you make it through all the levels, there’s a surprise in there for you at the end.”

“Oh yeah? What is it?”

“It’s not much of a surprise if I tell you _now_ , genius!”

Steve chuckled and lay back, settling into the chair as he took his tablet from her. At her nod, he said “Apertus,” and was back in that forest clearing again, only this time he could hear big cats rumbling around, something else he couldn’t see moving quickly through the forest. Gorillas, maybe, because that would make a pretty solid test for a supersoldier. 

And it was gorillas and they were a great test, so were the cats—a very different type of fighting and a little frightening without the shield, but he succeeded as if he were jumping up through levels like a video game, with something he couldn’t wait to tell Sam and Nat about. There were no fires this time but he had to jump off a waterfall to get away from one of the enormous leopards chasing him, and that was definitely…intense, especially not knowing what awaited him in the churning water beneath. Shuri had also programmed more mundane tests such as how to move through buildings by directing the simulation to where he wanted to be—which took him a few minutes to figure out—and simpler skills like evading being run down by a car or taking fire in combat. Plenty of it was lifted from World War II history—battles, weapons, and the like. He was glad that those elements were old hat to him, comfortable, and once he’d completed most of the tests, he found himself stepping from an elevator into that iron box once more. 

This time he needed neither the mandala nor the exit word. As soon as the water filled the chamber to his neck, Steve drew a deep breath and waited until it covered his head, eventually breathing out. The water rushed into his throat, his lungs, but instead of drowning he could pull in his breath. His body tried to fight it—that thing Shuri warned of where the brain knew it was not natural, even dangerous—but he breathed in again and it didn’t hurt. 

Instead of flailing he smiled and slowly leaned forward, continuing to breathe in the water, finding the handle in front of him, and he turned it. The water spilled from the box and he stepped out along with it, and Steve found himself in the center of a baseball diamond, breathing air once again.

Now he was laughing, no water in his lungs: he stood on Ebbets Field, a night game judging from the floodlights lit up above the stands. He turned around and around, taking in the stands and the people and the familiar old advertisements along the walls—Gem Razor Blades and Esquire Boot Polish and the Shaefer Beer scoreboard—and the scent of the fresh-cut grass. By the time he’d done a complete 360, he was facing the pitcher’s mound, and standing on it was Bucky. He looked like he had when he was home for leave before shipping out to Europe, his hair cut short, and lithe and trim, and his smile was as brilliant as the lights above them. 

Since this was just Steve’s training reverie, he knew Bucky wouldn’t really be able to interact with him, and that was all right. Just to see him young and smiling, before the war and Hydra and years of torture had stolen his light, was enough for Steve, but he still stepped forward and took Bucky’s hand. People began spilling out to the field as they had after the Reds game, everything in slow motion, and the wind stirred the small pieces of Bucky’s hair at the edge of his cap, just as slowly. He turned slightly away from Steve, grinning at the swarm of fans on the field, before looking at Steve again. For a while Steve was content to just bask in the sensation of touching him, looking up at the night sky through the gap in the floodlights, holding his hand, in this place that had once brought them so much joy.

* * *

Every once in a while, Shuri poked her head around the doorway to check on Steve and see if he’d left the program. The training period was as close to real time as she could make it, but there was room built in on either side for exploration. She had no idea if he was actually enjoying the different experiences this time, now that he knew what to expect. When she’d entered before on her own during testing phases, Shuri had spent a lot of her session’s time making mental notes of areas for improvement, but that was definitely not Steve’s goal here. They’d spent enough time by now to know each other better, so she’d figured he’d probably enjoy trying to outwit some panthers and engage in hand-to-hand combat with a giant silverback gorilla—Steve was enough like T’Challa that he would appreciate a good fight in testing, especially when it meant he didn’t have to worry about hurting someone real.

It was hard to focus on her work, though, because Shuri was eager to hear how he was doing. Eventually, when she looked in he was sitting up, rubbing his face but obviously pleased, so he’d seen the baseball diamond simulation. She wished she could have given him more than merely an image of Bucky that couldn’t respond, but with any luck he’d have plenty of interaction time when Steve joined Bucky’s own reverie. 

“Better this time?” Shuri asked.

“Better.” He stood up. “How did you do that?”

“Same way we design all of it until the user adds their own inputs—photographs, videos, written backgrounds. Usually it’s found in people’s digital histories, these days. Most of the pictures of your baseball field were black and white, though I found some color footage from the 1950s, before they tore it all down.”

“Yeah. The greedy bastard who owned the Dodgers sold the team to Los Angeles while I was under the ice. Two years after they’d won the World Series!” His disgust was palpable as he flung his hand out in an angry gesture, and it made Shuri smile. It was rare to see him get that worked up over anything. 

“How rude of them to win something big while you were gone.”

He favored her with a look. “I don’t know which was worse: finding out I was an unwilling time-traveler, or hearing those bums won a Series finally and then landed all the way across the country.” The corner of his mouth curled up. “So. Do you think I’m ready to jump into Bucky’s reverie now? How’d I look out here?”

Checking his readings on her bracelet, she said, “Very good: consistent heart rate with a few spikes—I assume you were fighting something—no unusual blood pressure, brain waves nice and…wavy.” But Shuri paused and scrunched up her face. She hated to throw cold water on his excitement to get started. “But, um, well. First off, we don’t know that it’s a good idea to jump in so soon after just being introduced to it. This is new territory. And there’s something else.”

“Uh-oh. Sounds dire.”

“It is—Mother would like you to join us for supper tonight.” Shuri grimaced.

Steve shook his head, but he seemed amused. “Not what I expected you to say.”

“I know would like to start using Reverie tonight. You are not the type to wait around for things, and I have read the books about you, as well—you don’t have much of an instinct for self-preservation. Which may be good when you dive in, but perhaps this is a blessing? I tried to tell Mother it was not good timing, but...”

He held out a hand to stop her. “I’d be honored.” Shuri really hoped Mother wasn’t planning to try to make Steve feel unwelcome in some way, to pressure him into feeling that he should just get Bucky better and then they should both get out. It was hard for her to tell if Mother thought they were overstaying their welcome or not. She was usually much more diplomatic than that, but these were the strangest of circumstances and Steve was still a wanted fugitive, to say nothing of Bucky. 

Studying Steve’s face but finding it unreadable, she considered that he might be thinking the same thing. He was always somewhat…regretful, maybe, about their visits, and he’d apologized more than a few times for involving Wakanda in his troubles. It had prompted her brother to remind Steve that he was the one who’d asked Steve and Bucky to come here in the first place. 

“If you wanted to look in on Serg— _Bucky_ , we have a little time,” Shuri offered. She motioned for him to follow her, and they headed toward the landing pad where the shuttle was, Ayo walking behind them.

“I might do that, but I think first I want to check in with the team, see how they’re holding up without me.”

“Dinner is not formal or anything. No one from the Council.” She didn’t know why she was trying to convince him; he admired Mother, and even got along all right with Okoye, which was more than you could say for Ross. 

After the discussion with Mother last night, though, Shuri wondered if they were concerned all of this Reverie stuff was too great a distraction, that her work on more important projects was slipping. She’d never had something go quite so wrong, not since she was a little girl, and it left her feeling somewhat unmoored. Or maybe Mother was trying to get a sense of just how long the captain’s visit would last, because Shuri shouldn't have allowed Bucky to try the program out in the first place and they wanted this project to be over with. 

Shuri kept watching him as they returned to the Citadel, and she and Ayo walked with him to his rooms, because she’d made a decision: it was time to tell him what she’d confessed to her brother last night, before he got started in Bucky’s reverie. Outside his door, she stepped closer to him so no one else would hear and said, “Steve, there is something I must tell you.”

He stopped and turned to her, his face open and trusting, like Bucky’s had been when she was describing Reverie and what it might mean for him. “What’s that?”

Shuri stared down at her feet. “Don’t you ever wonder how my brother found you and Sergeant Barnes that day?”

“I just assumed it was your superior tech, or that someone in his retinue had been in communication with some official or another.” 

Shaking her head, Shuri looked up at him. His brow wrinkled in confusion. “The superior tech was me.” His face didn’t change at all, he didn’t get angry, but she could see that his shoulders tightened a bit. He knew that Wakanda’s version of an internet didn’t play all that well with the rest of the world’s—not at the stage of development they were at—but he didn’t know how easy it was for her to exploit that advantage. “It took very little for me to get past every bit of security, and at the time, I was eager to do it. I knew T’Challa wanted to kill him, and I didn’t care.”

A muscle in his jaw twitched, and she wondered if she would finally see what he was like when he was angry, when his tightly self-contained exterior slipped. Shuri wasn’t afraid of him, but she was afraid of losing his respect. “Do you want me to be angry at you for that, or distrust what we’re doing here? Because I can tell you that won’t happen. Princess Shuri,” he said, and she thought he was calling her that because he wanted to underscore the gravity of his response. “You were reacting to terrible loss—first because of what happened in Lagos, and then the next time someone from your country went out into the world, your father was killed. If you want someone to blame you for helping your brother, you’ll have to look somewhere else—and not to Buck, because I’m certain he won’t, either.”

“He might not feel that way after he finds out, though, and after everything that has happened to him because of my program.”

“No. I know him better than I know myself. I promise you, we won’t.” Steve sighed. “Listen. Someone I care for very much told me something a while ago. She was talking about my being out of time, not knowing my place in this world I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be in, but it seems to fit here, too. She said, ‘The world has changed, and none of us can go back. All we can do is our best, and sometimes the best we can do is to start over.’ So. Let’s put that in the past and consider this doing our best and starting over, all right?”

“She sounds like a very wise woman,” Shuri said, trying to find a smile.

“She was. I think you’d have liked her very much, and I know she’d have been smitten with you.” His own smile didn’t quite reach his eyes, and Shuri realized that he must be referring to the person whose funeral he’d been at before the explosion in Vienna—she’d seen that in all the news reports after T’Challa, Steve, and Bucky had been arrested.

“‘Smitten.’ I like that word a lot.” Shuri waved a hand toward Ayo and turned to go. This had gone better than she’d had any right to expect, but it was definitely making her feel some kind of way, and she needed a little time to herself before being around her mother. “See you in a little while.”


	4. Attactus

Dinner with the royal family had allowed Steve a little distraction, and so did connecting with Nat and Sam after his evening visit to Bucky’s room. They’d left North America for refuge in Montenegro, thanks to some connections of Natasha’s, planning to rendezvous with Wanda, who was back in Sokovia working with the ongoing rebuilding efforts, very much off the radar thanks to her powers—and apparently Vision’s at the compound. Steve always felt a little guilty when he slipped away to Wakanda solo, but Sam and Nat were adamant that he absolutely shouldn’t be, not this time.

“It’s a freaking four-star luxury vacation here,” Sam said with a laugh. “This pal of Nat’s has a freaking _giant estate on the Adriatic_ —it’s practically its own little island. Didn’t even have to worry about the jet because there’s a damn helipad big enough to accommodate it here.”

“Must be a high roller,” Steve said, acting impressed. He intended to make a crack about Russian autocrats and their money, but Natasha popped her head into view at a sideways angle, smirking.

“Not organized crime, not Russian, and not nefarious, before you get on your high horse. Speaking of high rollers, how’s the king?” Natasha and T’Challa seemed to have an entertaining friendship that Steve hadn’t ever really been able to figure out.

“He’s well. Overwhelmed, I think,” Steve said, leaning back in his chair and taking a sip of his tea. This time he was taking Wanuri’s advice to try the sedative tea so his nerves didn’t get the better of him and he was up all night, heading in to the first Reverie exhausted. He had mostly acclimatized to the heat and elevation, but his internal clock still needed another day or so. “But he’s kind of happy about it, if that makes sense? I think after the coup attempt, he’s had so many ideas to implement and there’s a lot to do, both in Africa and in Oakland.” That was how it had sounded at dinner, at least. “You know, he said you guys are welcome to join me here. It might be a few days before I finish.”

Nat took a seat next to Sam and Steve realized then that the two of them were sitting on a big old-fashioned bed, leaning against an elaborately carved wooden headboard. The screen he was talking to them on was ultra high definition, so Steve could see what looked like Sam’s watch on one nightstand and Nat’s Widow’s Bites bracelet on the other. It made him raise his eyebrow, but he said nothing, because they would probably laugh at him whether he was right or wrong. Natasha had been _right there_ when Steve messaged Sam through his kimoyo bead, and Sam hadn’t called her in or anything. So now they were sharing rooms and beds?

“We’ll see how it goes,” Sam said, and there was a ghost of a smirk there, like he knew what Steve was thinking about. “How was the test run?”

“Interesting,” Steve replied, choosing to ignore things for now. There was enough to do with his own situation. “There were a few moments of…well, unpleasantness”—Natasha snorted—“but once I got the hang of it, I thought it was an amazing device. Shuri wasn’t kidding when she said it’s almost indistinguishable from reality. For good or bad.”

“We talkin’ grimdark _Black Mirror_ episode or more like _Inception_?” Sam asked.

Steve lifted a finger and cocked his head. “I…do not know how to answer that.”

On the screen, Natasha burst out laughing, and there was something about the utterly delighted way Sam responded to it that made Steve think _okay. Yeah. This is definitely a thing._ Had this been going on for a while and he’d simply been oblivious to it, or was it more like _while the cat’s away_? Well, if they had something to say, they’d tell him.

Steve rolled his eyes. “Don’t mock the pop culture afflicted. At the very least, I can see now how something might have gone wrong because of what Hydra did to Buck—now that I’ve been in one version, I feel more prepared for the possible ugly things I might find. I just want to get in there, figure it out, and get _him_ out.”

“Do you think he’s in any danger?” Nat asked, and her face became melancholy, the way it did when she was talking about the Red Room. “Not that I want to add to your stress, but do you think they could have put some kind of kill switch inside his mind in case someone tried to erase or re-engineer those activation words? They were like that, I hate to say—destroy the thing before it can be turned against you.”

Steve huffed out a breath. “Well, I hadn’t thought so before, so thanks for that.” It set him wondering if Bucky could have been kicked into that coma by design—not Shuri’s, of course, but someone like Zola anticipating an attempt to rewire their precious assassin, way back when. The princess had thought of it more as a possible bug in the code, that something she’d done had interacted poorly with Bucky’s damaged brain, when maybe it was more that Hydra, and Department X, would rather have destroyed the asset and burned the project than have anyone else make use of it or fix it. _Christ_.

They both stared at him with their wonderful faces, showing their supportive concern. He missed them already—it was such a hard life they were living now. He owed them everything. “Steve,” Sam said quietly, “don’t go down that rabbit hole. You’re with the best people on the planet for this. If anyone can help him, it’s you and Shuri. It’ll be okay.”

They ended the call, Nat urging him to contact them if he wanted them there, and Steve finally stopped trying to turn every possibility in his mind over and over again to find some side he hadn’t yet examined and went to bed. The tea—made from a fern, Queen Ramonda had told him, related to the heart-shaped herb that gave the Panthers their powers—proved mildly effective and he was able to get at least some rest.

The morning brought with it a case of nerves Steve hadn’t felt since he’d walked into the antiques store in Brooklyn for the Project Rebirth test, however. Excitement about the prospect of being able to help Bucky, of course, but there was the undercurrent of anxiety about exactly what he’d find inside Bucky’s reverie. The unknowns were just too unknown. 

He was back to being as tense as a bowstring while he got dressed and finished breakfast, tossing out some pieces of fruit for his brilliant blue bird friend, who seemed to have taken a shine to him and now hung around the pool. Wanuri knocked and entered, reminding him that she was going off her shift and his daytime Dora guard, Dyani, would take him up to the Design Group. 

“There you are!” Shuri chirped when he arrived, waving N’Deme over. “Hey, I have you all set up with a room now, you can call it your office,” and she walked them inside it. There was a reclining chaise like he’d used before, but the wall was lined with a long, contiguous couch that had tons of pillows and cushions scattered everywhere, a few more straight chairs, plus a low coffee table with a bowl of fruit on it, and a desk near a station for N’Deme to monitor Steve from. There were some beautiful paintings on the warm wooden walls, and lots of rugs in bold prints to help soften the sounds. Peaceful, Steve thought, in that particularly Wakandan way, and he felt a little of the tension ease out of him.

N’Deme handed him a glass panel that had Bucky’s photo centered on it, with all kinds of details about the program in those tidy little boxes. “This is Barnes’s reverie, which you will use to enter it. There is usually a central starting point built in to the program, a sort of library with many connecting doors to different subroutines, but depending on what he built, you may enter at a point we know nothing about.” It was N’Deme’s way of saying, “Expect the unexpected.”

“Understood.” Steve settled in the chaise as Shuri scanned him with her bracelet. “Ready, coach?”

With a dry laugh, she said, “I feel like you are unnaturally calm, but I suppose that is the supersoldier in you. The captain.”

He held the panel up. “Then that’s one of us who’s fooled.” Steve drew a deep breath. “Wish me luck.”

“We have our own way of wishing good fortune in Wakanda.”

“Oh yeah?”

Holding her hand up, she spread her two middle fingers apart. “Live long and prosper.” Shuri broke out in a fit of cackling.

Steve gave her the side-eye but he couldn’t help laughing; she was such a goof and he loved that about her. 

“No? Okay. It’s actually _May Bast’s light shine on you_.”

“I like that one better.” He stared at the glass. _Here we go._ “Apertus.” There was that weird sensation like being hit with a gust of wind that he’d had in the first trial, and then it was dark.

When he opened his eyes, Steve was at the edge of a wooded area, no place that he recognized. Brooklyn, or somewhere else Bucky had had memories of, maybe even Indiana? Steve had arrived where the stands of beech and ash and cottonwood trees gave way to a field, and he could see up the gentle slope ahead of him to where a woman and a toddler sat on a bright blue picnic blanket. Though he couldn’t see them well enough to discern what they were doing, they might have been playing peekaboo. To his left in the shade of the trees was a brook, running along further inside the woods where it grew too dark for Steve to see, and a dark-haired little boy was playing at the side of the stream, under the flickering sunlight. He wore the knee-length trousers and pinstriped, collarless shirt of the early 1920s, a newsboy cap perched on his head—Bucky, when he was around five or six, shortly before they’d met in Brooklyn. 

The dappled light danced as the leaves shimmied in the breeze, and Steve watched him for a moment in silence, rapt: this was most likely Indiana, and that was Mrs. Barnes with Becca, the next oldest child. It must have been late summer as it shaded into autumn, judging from the mix of golden and red and still-green leaves that had yet to turn. He hadn’t thought someone could transform into their child self in here, he’d thought their appearance inside Reverie was limited to fixed constructs of them as they were outside the program, and he wondered if Bucky was capable of recognizing him as adult, and post-serumed, Steve. There were no sounds here other than the bubbling of the brook and the stirring of the leaves, and Steve stepped closer, hoping not to spook him.

Instead of startling or being confused, Bucky said, “Hey Steve, come look at this.” He didn’t look up at Steve, though, somehow knowing he was there without making eye contact, and for a second he was disoriented himself, glancing down at his body to see if he’d somehow become young or small again inside the program, but he was the same as ever. What was Bucky seeing? It was a while before they would meet in Brooklyn, yet Bucky knew who was standing here. 

“What is it?” Steve asked, moving closer, yet Bucky still didn’t look up at him. He splashed his hands into the running water, then held up what he’d been aiming for: a salamander, about the size of his palm, black and white, its wet skin gleaming in the filtered light. It was beautiful here, peaceful. Pastoral, almost like a storybook. Just the kind of place you’d want to make to heal yourself.

“If you cut its tail off, it’ll grow back,” Bucky said, without any show of emotion, and it chilled Steve—that was not the way Bucky was, even as a little boy. He’d never wanted to hurt anything, not even when other boys egged him on. 

“You shouldn’t do that, it’s cruel,” Steve said, trying to sound neutral, because this did not feel like a real conversation at all. More like something constructed, staged. “It’s a myth—they can lose their tails when they try to get away from predators or from injury, but you can’t just cut it off and it grows back.”

“I don’t know. I’m gonna see.” He pulled his jackknife out of his pants pocket and Steve wasn’t sure if he should try to take it away or let this play out and see what was happening. When Bucky flicked the knife open, Steve took a few more steps toward him. There was no effort on Bucky’s part to look at him; it was as though Steve was here and yet not, as though he was part of Bucky’s mind and the experiences he was reliving in Reverie yet without understanding who Steve was or why Bucky should pay attention to him. 

“You’re not a cruel person,” Steve said, and saw a shadow shift at the corner of his eye, at the top of the slope. Winter Soldier Bucky was standing up there, dressed in the tac gear he’d worn when Steve had first encountered him in 2014. It filled him with some kind of inchoate dread; Bucky’s mother and sister were directly between Steve and the Soldier and he didn’t know what that Bucky would do. 

Steve wanted to break through to the young Bucky holding the salamander, but he felt an overpowering sense of danger for Mrs. Barnes and Rebecca—even though he knew they weren’t real. It _felt_ far too real in here, and he forced himself to take deep breaths, remember to keep his heart rate down and his fear response controlled so Shuri and N’Deme didn’t worry. When he looked down again, the salamander slipped out of Bucky’s grip and splashed into the stream, but Bucky didn’t pursue it, merely squatted there with his shoes and socks getting wet, almost frozen, as if the program was stalling. As if it was a video that tried to buffer, and failed. When Steve turned toward the Bucky in the field, he was staring back at Steve, the breeze moving his long hair, and then he abruptly turned and sprinted away from the woods, over the top of the slope. 

Steve bolted after him.

He lost sight of Bucky as he crested the ridge, searching wildly for a trace of him. But next thing Steve knew, he was stepping into a bar, where Steve spotted him leaning against the bar, warily surveying the room. He wore an army uniform and jacket—early 1950s-era, if Steve recalled correctly, and he had gloves on his hands, his left holding a pint of beer. His hair was cut similar to how it had looked in the war, and he was clean-shaven, no stubble like the Soldier’d had—but he was absolutely the Soldier here, Steve could see it in the predatory cast to his eyes, the tight forward angle of his shoulders. Bucky’d been just like that on the helicarrier.

In the first years of his captivity they’d called Bucky “the American”; their first test of the brainwashing’s success had come when the Soviets sent him to a bar frequented by US and UK soldiers. It was to see if he’d be caught entering from East Germany to West, if he could pass for whatever they wanted him to be, if he could kill without being caught. They’d so thoroughly hollowed out Bucky’s mind that he hadn’t even realized the reason he so successfully passed that test was because he had always been an American. There was no doubt about the veracity of his accent or his behavior because it all fit him like old clothes, and it had killed Steve to read that in the file and think how cruelly they’d twisted him up. 

_Hopes are high that he will be a successful operative. I believe, because he walks and talks just like them, because he exudes “America” with his every breath, that the enemy will never see him coming._

Steve stood here now in Bucky’s program, watching from the door, just to see why he’d chosen to come here. What could revisiting this do for him? It seemed almost counterintuitive that Bucky’d have built something so terrible into his Reverie program. And maybe worse, why would he build this to relive experiences as the Soldier? The answer was obvious: he hadn’t. His mind was a fractured fun-house mirror and the program was picking up the shards.

Steve watched as Bucky eventually struck up conversations with other soldiers over rounds of beer and darts games—no one in this re-creation seemed to notice he didn’t take the gloves off, almost the way child Bucky hadn’t noticed Steve’s appearance. Though he stayed well out of the line of sight, at one point Bucky clocked him, blank-faced but with just enough suspicion in his eyes that Steve realized he knew Steve didn’t belong here. Then he slipped out the door into the cold night. A sharp, cold unease crept into Steve’s gut: Bucky had the Soldier’s instinct to know something was wrong but didn’t care enough to do anything about it.

The farther away from the bar they got, the faster he moved, darting through dark, rubbled streets still in ruins from the war. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to his course, like he was just jumping from spot to spot the way a video game character would. Steve kept losing him—not like in a foot chase but in that gamelike way, at random places and intervals—only to catch up, as though Bucky’s avatar was just stuck there until Steve’s presence pressed some key that got him moving again. Eventually, though, Steve recognized the klieg lights of Checkpoint Charlie cutting through the murky night, helping to orient him, and then he rounded another random corner behind Bucky, fully expecting to see him crossing over the border into East Germany.

An overturned Jeep lay in the center of the street, flames billowing from the engine, three bodies hanging partially out the doors. Bucky was walking away from the wreck, not even concerned about whether Steve was still there. He’d killed three American soldiers that night as a way for the Soviets to verify their new asset was capable of getting away with it, the earliest evidence of the Winter Soldier’s calling card.

_**Report — Codename: Winter Soldier Field Test, 5 November 1954.**  
All objectives achieved. Codename: Winter Soldier encounters no difficulty on mission.  
As predicted, Americans and allies mistake him for one of their own. Allow him unimpeded entrance into West Berlin. Winter Soldier spends evening in Berlin nightclub among many U.S. and U.K. servicemen, unsuspected.   
Jeep overturns at 02:45 killing three soldiers en route to base from nightclub. Crash not investigated. Assumed drunken roadway accident._

Steve ran to the Jeep, even though there was nothing he could really do to help or change the circumstances. Instead of reaching it, however, he found himself flat on his back in a room somewhere. No, not a room—a hallway, dingy grey concrete dotted with industrial, cold lights hanging above him. He was passing rapidly under them like a car under streetlights and then he realized he was on a gurney, men on either side wheeling him down the hallway. They all wore grey surgical gowns, masks and gloves, prepared for…the operation on Bucky’s arm, most likely. In all the photos of the group of scientists who’d worked on Bucky, they were outfitted exactly like this. Steve tried to rise off the gurney but he was strapped down. The gurney finally stopped, dead center of an operating theatre.

In the corner of the room stood Bucky, partially undressed, just like the photos in the files that were taken in the earliest days of his captivity, when they’d had him on a table for study, covered in electrodes and hooked up to various machines. His left arm was missing, still unhealed.

This shouldn’t be happening. Bucky as a child being observed by Bucky as the Soldier; now Steve somehow in Bucky’s place being wheeled into an operating theatre—this was all kinds of wrong. For some reason, there was a sort of transference happening with the other figures inside this reverie. Steve should exit the program immediately and find out what was going on, but he also wanted to see how far it would play out—would Bucky stop them from harming him?

When they began hooking him up to wires and IVs, as if this was deliberately part of Bucky’s program in some way, Steve had to focus and remind himself that they were constructs of the program. They didn’t really see him, see the actual person on the table, because it was Bucky’s memory. 

But the sound of a saw started up and Steve surged hard against the straps, coming up on the table in a fighting stance. The men kept coming toward him as though it hadn’t happened, one with a syringe in hand, the other with the saw, like they were programmed. They couldn’t even comprehend that Steve wasn’t their intended victim. And Bucky had disappeared again; the spot where he’d been standing was pixelated, that part of the room appearing like a download that gets stuck, stuttering, and the colors bled into a dark, indistinct negative image.

Steve threw the gurney into the scientists’ way and rushed to the door, running headlong into a huge, cavernous room, one of the largest spaces he’d ever seen. It looked like…a missile silo. Cyrillic letters everywhere—this must be the Siberian location they’d started keeping Bucky in by the early 1980s, just before everything began falling apart and Hydra moved away from the USSR. Before they’d sold Bucky off to Pierce and the Western factions. It hadn’t been abandoned for long before they put him here; it was still relatively clean, well-lit, with equipment that no doubt functioned, at least in this Reverie simulacrum of Bucky’s. 

The stasis tube he’d been frozen in stood in the center of the space, glowing eerily green-gold. This time, Bucky was inside, not watching from a distance, and Steve stepped tentatively toward the cryo tube. All of a sudden Bucky’s metal arm shot up from his side, through the viscous fluid, and his eyes opened; he pounded on the glass with his left fist, and Steve thought he was screaming something but there was a black mask on the lower part of his face, tubes connected to it every which way. All Steve could tell was that his eyes were desperate enough that he didn’t need words. 

He grabbed a support strut holding the machine’s platform up and broke it off, beating at the glass with all his strength until it shattered and Bucky fell forward out of it, where Steve caught him in his arms. But the metal hand closed around Steve’s throat, Bucky’s right hand coming up to punch him on the side of the head. Steve desperately tried to speak and reason with him, but there was such a fury in his eyes he heard nothing, as though he believed Steve was one of his torturers and he wasn’t going to pass up this chance to kill him. _Shit, shit, shit._

If the Steve in here was separated from his conscious self out there, he might very well end up in the same state as Bucky, or maybe even die. The room was—the only word Steve could think of was _disintegrating_ , chunks of it blackening and falling away, other parts of it crackling with red lightning around the edges as though something electronic was fritzing out. The floor shook beneath them as Bucky continued to squeeze the life out of him and Steve fought to pull him off. “Who are you?” Bucky demanded, his voice ragged behind the mask, as a huge chasm opened up behind them and everything slid toward it.

All Steve knew was that as desperately as he wanted to connect to Bucky and save him, he had to get out of here. Live to fight another day. “Exitus!” Steve shouted, slamming his hand against the cryo door although no mandala was nearby, and suddenly he was on the chair in his room, gasping. In this world.

Steve lowered the glass to his lap and looked up at Shuri. His heart was beating way too hard and fast. “You were right,” he said, sitting up. “He’s glitching. I don’t know if I can get him out.”

* * *

“Tell me everything,” Shuri said, leaning across the table from Steve, pushing some coffee at him and motioning for him to drink up. He absolutely loved Wakandan coffee, but she could tell he wasn’t really tasting it. She’d found the cookies she’d promised and he was already through half the packet, his mind racing in a distracted way—he was barely paying attention to her. 

When he’d exited the program, he’d been gasping for air, and she’d tried to soothe him, reminding him to breathe, everything was all right. But Shuri’d felt such a cold knot in her stomach, wondering what had gone wrong that he looked so afraid and so defeated. Steve hadn’t even been inside Reverie all that long. 

His mouth twisted up and he glanced from N’Deme to her. “I entered in a really peaceful setting, Bucky’s mom and his sister on a picnic blanket, and he was a little boy, playing in a brook. It was strange, because I didn’t realize you could become something other than what you are—at this age, I mean. I didn’t know you could make yourself into a kid like that.”

Shuri shook her head. “You could build yourself an avatar of someone else—like, if you were disabled in some way, you could create a reverie where you no longer have that disability. But mostly, those of us who tested it only created other people. His mother and sister, for example. We stayed as we are.”

“They made sense, it was exactly what I would have expected. The oddest part was he knew me, or at least, he called me over to see what he was doing, like we were kids together. As if he was seeing me as a boy, not a grown man.” N’Deme brought over some bread and a stew, because he tended to think food solved everything. She poured some more coffee while they watched him shovel his food in; his metabolism was fascinating, something she wouldn’t mind studying when this was all over. “After a few minutes, though, I realized someone was standing uphill from his family and from me, and it was the Winter Soldier. There was something…I don’t know how to describe it. But he didn’t react to me—then he ran away.”

“Interesting. The creation of his child self as an avatar that reacted to you, but then Bucky as his most recent identity watching from afar. Did the others interact with you?” N’Deme asked.

“Nope. It was just like you’d described, they were constructs. I was a little startled by his child self talking to me, though, at first, and he wasn’t quite the Bucky I knew around that age.”

“What happened when you followed him?” Shuri said, raising her eyebrows at N’Deme, who gave her a slight shrug. No one had reported the test versions creating scenarios like this. But then, none of them had had their minds manipulated by evil mad scientists, either. 

“Well, I guess that’s where it gets interesting.” Steve told her about Bucky’s first tests as an assassin, and how he had essentially watched the events contained in the files play out before him inside Reverie. No one in the bar had noticed him there, either, he said—which was good, she thought. Then he’d followed Bucky into a new scenario, where he was essentially experiencing what Bucky had when they’d given him the metal arm, as though he was in Bucky’s representation inside the program. Steve had rubbed his eyes when he was finished recounting it, looking away. “How is that even possible, for me to basically end up on that table in his place, where he should have been?”

She and N’Deme stared at each other. “None of us have seen anything comparable,” N’Deme said. “That is a disappointing answer, once again, I know. But we spent many hours inside it, trying various scripts, in both 1.0 and 2.0. I simply do not know how that would happen.”

“He is glitching, as you said.” Shuri rubbed her forehead; she never should have let Bucky use the program. Bashenga’s tears, what an arrogant fool she was. “This is something unique to him, and to his own reverie, creating some kind of cascade damage to the failsafes inside Reverie.”

“I might have a theory about that.” Steve looked a little sheepish, like he wasn’t allowed to have theories about technology or something. He wiped his mouth and set the napkin on the table.

Shuri got some coffee for herself, her head and heart both hurting, and waited.

“Okay, so. We know from records that Hydra programmed his responses to the trigger phrases after they’d had him already for a number of years. At first, he was a blank slate, and they used his damaged memory and not knowing who he was to create the impression he was Russian, a willing operative working against his own country. But he was unstable and unpredictable from the very beginning, dangerous at times, and even once they’d figured out how to control him, things could happen. He killed a number of their own people.”

“He said that the longer he was out of cryo sleep, the more unstable he became.” She’d thought that heartbreaking at the time; while some degree of this project had been academic and a way to see if she could build something useful, revelations like those were the emotional core of what had driven her to try to perfect it. “What is your theory, then?”

“The first time I encountered him as the Soldier a few years ago, it only took me saying his name to cause something like a short-circuit. I could see it on his face, as stunned as I was to find out he was alive, and they had to use the chair to wipe his mind, make him function again. And in Berlin, all we had to do was basically knock him unconscious after his rampage. He woke up knowing who he was.” Steve made a face. “When you mentioned failsafes—my thought is that maybe part of Hydra’s programming in the later years was to have him break down if anyone tried to override the conditioning. If he fell into enemy hands or couldn’t complete a mission, someone trying to basically…well, hack him would end up with a fractured, useless, unstable killing machine who’s nevertheless still dangerously unpredictable.”

And if that was the case, you would just kill it, like a wild animal, she thought. How could anyone be so evil? “But he’s been out of their control for so long, the failsafe might have failed. So removing the trigger phrases may not even be our main goal here,” Shuri mused. 

“I don’t know. But maybe that will happen once we figure out a way to put the fragments together, and he comes out of there.” Steve shook his head. “As terrifying as it felt to be on that gurney watching those bastards come at me, once he appeared inside the room, it felt different, like he had shown up because he knew it was the right thing to do. So I followed him into what I recognized was the facility where he was kept in Siberia.”

“Where T’Challa found you,” Shuri said. Glory to Bast that he had, too, so he’d been able to learn the truth about Zemo’s plan.

“Yeah. But this was before it was mothballed, and he was still active. There was no one else around, just him, desperately trying to get out of the cryo chamber. They left him in stasis sometimes for years, the files indicated.” He closed his eyes, the muscle on his jaw twitching, and though he slid his hand under the table, she caught a glimpse of him making a fist.

“Mothballed?” N’Deme asked.

“It’s like…I guess putting something away, decommissioning. As soon as I pulled him out of the chamber, he tried to kill me. He knew I was a threat, somehow.” Steve ate the last cookie in the packet and smiled at Shuri, not at all the behavior she expected after such a fraught story. “And this is what I think is a good sign, despite him seesawing back and forth on knowing me or not knowing me: the room began disintegrating in a way, chunks of walls and equipment and floors turning black and vanishing, and there was this red sort of electricity crackling around the edges. As though all the things he was creating as he went along were suddenly falling apart.”

Shuri narrowed her eyes. “And you think this is good because…?”

“Look, I’m not like you guys, I don’t know a thing about the science. But I do know what a fighter Buck is, I know how damn hard he’s worked to free himself from them.” Steve spread his hands wide. “His behavior, it was like I was violating his space, even if he didn’t know he’d set up that space to begin with. Whether he thought I was familiar or not. The program’s reflecting what’s happening in his mind, correct? If he’s creating the glitches, I don’t know that he’s trapped so much as his brain is working this out in the program. He might not be aware of it, but his brain is trying to override those failsafes Hydra could have built.”

Ah, she saw what he was getting at. “Okay.”

“Maybe,” Steve said, “I just help steer those things he’s trying to work out or overcome in a safer direction. He can’t guide it himself, because he’s fighting the conditioning, so I do it for him. Eventually, he’ll come back.”

“Yes, I see,” N’Deme said. “Control the environment, so it’s less harmful to him. Rebuild his reverie without him knowing.” He rose from his seat, lost in thought. “I have some adjustments to make to your own controls which I think may help you.”

Shuri wasn’t necessarily convinced that any of this was accurate, but Steve’s confidence in his interpretation of the events was all they had to go on, and if it worked for N’Deme, then it would work for her. Unless she herself wanted to go in, Steve’s belief would have to suffice—and from the sound of it, she wouldn’t fare well in Bucky’s splintered virtual reality. 

“Before you try to blame yourself again,” Steve said, reaching across and squeezing her fingers, “I want to remind you this is not your fault.”

“I know that now. It’s just…we all thought it would be so useful as a therapeutic tool when we were working it out. I just can’t account for...” and she trailed off. The sharp prickle of tears was threatening behind her eyes again. “How could you have such scientific capabilities _seventy years ago_ and do something so horribly cruel?”

His face softened. “Come on,” Steve said, and took hold of her elbow, helping her up and steering her to the corridor that led out of the building. “Let’s get some fresh air.”

The sun was almost in the west when they got outside and she followed him to one of the rocky outcroppings that looked down toward Birnin Zana and her home. In a few hours there would be a beautiful sunset thanks to the cloud striations forming on the horizon. The sky over the ocean was her favorite thing about the Bay Area—they had the gorgeous sunsets but with the added bonus of water, and she hadn’t yet grown tired of gazing at the ocean, thinking of new things to do and teach. But this was home, and all the more beautiful for it. They sipped at the coconut-lemon drinks he’d grabbed on the way out, as she waited for him to speak. Shuri knew him well enough by now to know when he was working up to something.

“One of the things about all this running around on our own the past year has been that we’ve been able to uncover a lot of the detailed histories of the Winter Soldier project. Natasha’s translated and digitized all of them, and some of it might be useful to you and N’Deme, if you think you can handle reading them.”

She nodded, although she wasn’t certain she could or even wished to. “All right.”

“And I want to be clear here: I’m not saying I’m right about this. I could be wildly off base. It probably won’t be quick, either. So I want to be clear about this as well: you have all done a lot already. You don’t owe us anything further. The longer I’m here, the more dangerous it becomes, the more likely it is every country that wants justice or punishment for the Winter Soldier’s crimes will know where to go to achieve that.”

She nodded again. It might be that she was projecting a little bit, but Steve looked as though he were expecting the worst from her, that she would agree it might be best for them to go. Then she touched a kimoyo bead and T’Challa’s face appeared in front of them. 

“Were you successful?” he asked with a smile. Okoye was watching from behind him; she usually pretended to be disinterested in their guests’ problems, but her curiosity was getting the better of her.

“Well, you know, no plan survives first contact,” Steve said. 

T’Challa laughed and Okoye’s left brow lifted. “No, it usually does not.”

“But I think we learned a lot for the next time, if that happens. And it gives me a baseline to work from.”

“Brother,” Shuri interjected, before T’Challa might understand what Steve had said. “The solution may take some time, more time than we anticipated because of Hydra’s complicated mind control.”

Steve cleared his throat. “I don’t want to see this become more of an international incident than it already is.” Did the captain think he would be able to safely move Bucky by himself and find someplace he’d be as welcome as he was here, and then use Reverie on his own? She almost shook her head at how stubborn and silly he was. _Ey_ , Sam Wilson was right—Steve was hopeless.

Her brother looked thoughtful, as though he was weighing options, but she knew it was just so Steve would think he’d given the idea due consideration despite its idiocy—he’d made up his mind long ago. “We could not be in a better position for this right now. Everyone is interested in what Wakanda may offer them. They are more distracted by what we have here than _who_ we have here. It will take as long as it must take.”

With a long-suffering glance at Steve, Shuri said, “The Black Panther has spoken,” and cracked up at T’Challa’s and Steve’s sour faces. Men were such drama queens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd hoped I would be able to do a regular update schedule of about two weeks, but it's looking more like one a month. Thanks so much for your patience!


	5. Intellectus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arg! Exactly three months since I last posted! I beg your indulgence for the lengthy delay between chapter updates: I took time away to write my Yuletide fic, then there was lots of short-deadline work, then there was an attempted right-wing coup, and then there was—checks notes—Everything Else in These Uncertain Times, and it all added up to a really long interval. Maybe I should just give up on trying to convince myself, and readers, I can maintain any kind of schedule.

Waking early for video conferences had rapidly moved up from near the middle of Shuri’s list of Least Favorite Things to a spot in the top three; it was especially tiresome when her mind was on her other projects and most of the meeting was devoted to hand-holding. The only old white men who needed her help that she was interested in at this moment were Steve and Bucky. 

She was pretty sure that Nakia was equally annoyed by the conference, but you’d never know it, because a War Dog’s face never told. This particular man, a leader of the European Union’s task force on new technology, wasn’t necessarily a bad guy, nor were the rest of the delegation sharing the screen, it was just that everyone was so dramatic about vibranium, its reputation for instability in raw form, the resources coming from Wakanda to learn to work with it, and how and why and where and on and on…it just gave her a headache. It seemed as though they never read past the first few lines of the fact sheets she’d compiled, never truly listened to the Wakandan advance teams for technology in the exchange programs… _Why is this so hard?_ Shuri always wanted to ask. Well, she knew the answer, but it was too depressing and enraging to think much about.

Shuri was supposed to get up to the lab and start Steve on his next Reverie session, but instead she was explaining for the hundredth time that they would not be setting up refining processes anywhere else—and yes, Wakanda would still have total control over allotments. 

Out of the corner of her eye, Shuri saw Desta poke her head through the door, and she motioned that it was all right to come inside. Yes, she was running late, she didn’t need a Dora to tell her that. But then she saw that Steve was right behind Desta and she snapped her eyes back on the screen, quickly minimizing it so no one else could catch sight of him. Of course Nakia knew he was here, but they definitely didn’t want an EU official spotting an international fugitive lurking in the princess of Wakanda’s private rooms. Ugh, Mother would never let her hear the end of it.

She made an apologetic face to Desta and Steve and shrugged dramatically, angled away from the screen’s view, and Steve nodded once and turned to go. Her stomach lurched, anxious that now he might think she was blowing him off or that Reverie—and saving Bucky—didn’t matter to her.

For the next fifteen minutes Shuri and Nakia repeated all their talking points—how was this her life now, using stupid jargon like _talking points_?—until finally, blessedly, the minister or chancellor or whatever his title was which she’d quickly forgotten thanked them and went away, and she was left with only Nakia facing her on the screen.

“Did I catch a brief glimpse of Captain Rogers?” Nakia asked in a light tone, after she’d apologized for the length of the meeting. Shuri so did not envy her the social outreach position—or her brother’s responsibilities, for that matter—when it was exhausting enough just being the tech goddess. She wasn’t required to attend half the events and meetings they were.

Mother had reminded her repeatedly that it was important to keep in mind the shock the rest of the world was going through, that the reveal of Wakanda’s gifts—and of the Black Panther himself—had stunned outsiders much the same as Shuri had been by the alien invasion of New York and the discovery of Asgardians. 

“Yes, I forgot to tell him that I had this conference. I believe he expected to go to the Design Group with me.” Shuri glanced toward the door, even though Steve was long gone.

Steve had promised her once that Thor would be back eventually, and she’d be able to pick his brain—a dream come true, if so. The way things were going, she feared she might never be able to sit down with Dr. Banner and Mr. Stark and Dr. Foster, unless someone could bring their team back together. 

“Should I ask?” Nakia gave her a hopeful smile.

“No change yet. But it is early, the captain only just made contact with Sergeant Barnes yesterday, and it was…difficult, from what I heard.” Perhaps sharing more about the problem could be valuable, because Nakia was brilliant at coming up with strategies others often overlooked, but Shuri also thought that it was only Steve’s story to tell and not her place to say anything—ey, it was so complicated. “There are things the sergeant seems to be able to do with the program I didn’t think were possible, so it will be challenging.”

“Ah. T’Challa says you are spending all your time on it.” It wasn’t a judgment on her, Shuri knew—Nakia was not that type of person. But it ate at her again, this need to solve it, this knowledge that she’d never failed something before. If Bucky could make things happen in Reverie without even intending to, how would Shuri maintain control of the process so Steve was safe in there? How could she ensure Bucky got out before his health out here deteriorated? It was a conundrum, and Shuri had never been particularly fond of conundrums.

Her frustration must have shown on her face because Nakia laughed. “You want to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. But you are too skinny for that.”

Shuri shook her head and scoffed. “Not the world, just this little corner of it.” She pressed the fingertips of her right hand into her bottom lip, the nails digging into the skin. It was her go-to method of refocusing, a holdover from the days when she’d worked to cure herself of biting her nails. 

“My meetings are almost done here and I can skip returning to Oakland. I haven’t been home in a while.”

Shuri knew what she was trying to do, and it was appreciated. “My brother would like that. And I know the captain would be pleased to see you.” Even if this was beyond her control—it was up to Bucky’s mind and Steve’s determination, really—having her friend here to talk to wouldn’t hurt, either. 

As though she knew what she was thinking, Nakia said, “Shuri—when did you last spend time with your friends? When did you leave your work for a few hours and go into the city, to a club or a meal or something? And I don’t mean in Oakland—I mean here.”

“Oh, you are just like Mother.” But she couldn’t help smiling. All her life Shuri’d wanted a sister, and now she had the very best one. She could not complain.

“I think the captain _and_ the sergeant would both prefer knowing you were not putting your life in a holding pattern for them.”

“I know.” Though she dipped her head in acknowledgement, it was easier to agree with such things than to truly accept them. Since Baba’s death she’d hardly even spoken to any of her old friends. Life was so different now.

They talked about other things for a little while longer and then ended the call, and Shuri raced her hoverbike up to the lab as fast as possible. Ayo chased along behind her, warning her about being reckless as Shuri just laughed. She was breathless by the time she reached Steve’s room only to find he was already in Reverie, the panel lying on his lap and his hands still gripping its sides. N’Deme greeted her. “How long?” Shuri asked, possibly a tiny bit annoyed that he’d started without her.

“A few minutes. He felt confident that he would not need to interrupt your work, he said, and he seems very comfortable now with the program. I would not have allowed him to enter it if I disagreed.” He offered her a respectful smile—she hadn’t meant to make anyone feel they had to defer to her own desires, so she waved her arm. It was fine.

“I know he is in good hands,” Shuri said, “I just wanted to make sure he is okay. I did not expect the meeting to take so long. But the captain is very capable, even when he is not okay, you are right.”

“For outsiders, they are not bad.”

She burst out laughing. “And they are so old, too! Which makes it even more impressive that they can learn new things.”

So. Now she had some time on her hands while Steve bounced around inside the program, doing whatever he would be doing today under N’Deme’s watchful eye. Anyway: whatever happened in there, neither she nor N’Deme could do anything about it out here, so she might as well get to work on the myriad projects waiting for her attention. She was already turning over in her mind what Nakia had said—and what Mother had been harping on for some time—about seeing her friends. Shuri had been putting it off since before that first trip to California, when T’Challa had told her of his plans for outreach. Her avoidance was simply fear, she had to admit as she began pulling up her triaged list of stalled work: afraid her friends would now find her, well, princessy and a little stuck up, the kind of girl who believed the reports that she was important because she was jetting around the globe and meeting with heads of state. Being _royal._ Not someone you’d want to see a movie with or hang out in the park together. And that would be soul-crushing, if she found out it was true, because she’d fought like mad to never be that kind of person, to the point of driving Baba and Mama crazy with what they often saw as disrespect for her birthright. She was proud of her intellect and her abilities, proud of what Wakanda was accomplishing now, but she could not abide it if the people who’d known her best all her life thought her arrogant or smug or entitled. 

But how did you approach people you’d allowed yourself to fall out of communication with? You couldn’t really just say “Hey, sorry I lost touch, I’ve been busy being one of the most important people in the world, you know how it goes. When can I fit you into my schedule? I’ll let you know what works for me.”

It took everything in Shuri’s control to concentrate on work now and not constantly get up to look in on Steve. She kept pulling up his room on her bead—sometimes N’Deme was in there, sometimes not, so she’d sneak a little peek at Steve’s vitals if he was out of visual contact. For tracking purposes. That was all. 

After a few hours of it being much too quiet, she brought some lunch to N’Deme and they sat and talked quietly about general programming aspects of Reverie. When Steve still hadn’t exited and they’d finished eating, she reluctantly went back to work, saying “Please let me know the instant he comes out.” To his credit, N’Deme didn’t roll his eyes, though she could tell that every molecule in his being wanted to. She was being a mama panther, but she wouldn’t be ashamed of that. There were so many scenarios she’d concocted in her mind, all the things that could go wrong now that they knew how messed up Bucky was in there. How was she expected not to stress over that? She stabbed a screwdriver into her modeling sand and huffed.

* * *

_Huh._

N’Deme had told him before that “the box” wasn’t actually the iron box Steve had been trapped in during his practice runs: it was an arrival point they’d built in as a default. It looked like a library space with many doors, something that seemed comfortable and familiar for a starting point. A user could build as many worlds as they wanted, and then use the doors to enter them. Once they were familiar with the program, they could skip it if they chose to, or build their own portal. Steve had expected to land in the box this time—beginner level in the library, basically. Instead, Steve had opened his eyes to find himself in the lobby of a posh hotel; Bucky must be here right now.

The spacious lobby looked European, possibly in the post-war era; he always had trouble distinguishing specifics about those midcentury years, but the seating and the telephones and the clothes spoke of the early 1960s. He’d seen photos of Peggy wearing smart little suits and low-heeled shoes like some of the ladies buzzing about this lobby; the men’s suits and ties reminded him of the photos of Howard Stark from then, too. No one, though, noticed him at all or appeared aware of him watching them, and the low conversational hum was indistinct, because they weren’t really talking at all, not in recognizable words anyway. He’d have to ask Shuri about that: did the computer create dialog for the other people in the reverie, or did the user build all that on their own?

Steve was about to make his way through the lobby to look for clues of where Bucky might be when the elevator went _ding_ and out stepped Bucky. He was wearing a thick black turtleneck sweater under a teal peacoat not unlike the one he’d worn in the war, with charcoal trousers, dress shoes instead of combat boots, and of course black leather gloves on both hands. In his right hand he was carrying a long canvas bag, the kind most people used for skis but which Steve knew carried a rifle. _He looks…hip_ Steve thought, like some cool young European guy heading off for a ski weekend in the mountains. His hair was short still, a clue that allowed Steve to tell where and when they were: Barcelona 1964, just before the week of a major political conference that could have brought some of Europe into the escalating US war in Southeast Asia. It took him a moment because he’d been so focused on Bucky, but Steve realized a young woman who’d stepped off the elevator with Bucky was also a Soviet agent—a Black Widow, in fact. Tall and willowy with auburn hair, she had a quality about her that felt familiar; he wondered if he’d seen her photo in those Hydra files he and Nat had pored over after DC. She was the very picture of the swinging, chic girlfriend a guy like Bucky was playing would have.

Natasha’s stories about her early assignments had given him an idea of these operations ran: she was either a honey trap to lure a target in for a kill, by her own hand or another agent’s; a girlfriend or mistress who extracted secrets from a subject during an affair; or the messenger to deliver kompromat and blackmail a subject into doing Russia’s bidding. But Steve knew from the Soldier’s files—and the bag with the rifle confirmed it—that this woman had brought their target to a hotel, and Bucky’d shot him through the window. It had seemed unnecessary to Steve, to have a long-range assassination when close-up work by a Widow would accomplish the same goal, but he supposed there was an element of control in it for their bosses, too. They had both been things to be used.

After watching Bucky and the woman for a few beats, Steve tried to blend in with the other people moving through this reverie, but he was too late: Bucky clocked Steve just as he stepped into the crowd, his head whipping around with that preternatural awareness the Soldier had, glaring directly at Steve. He put a hand on his companion’s arm and said something to her; she hesitated, looking around, but then nodded slightly and slipped back into the lift. At no time did it seem as though she was aware of Steve at all. Bucky began stalking toward Steve, fully aware something was askew, so since the jig was up, Steve darted around the people passing by him and said, holding his hands up, “Bucky, it’s Steve. You remember me? It’s Steve.”

That stopped him in his tracks and he shook his head sharply, as if to shake out the confusion. He seemed cognizant of the fact that he was somewhere it was _wrong_ when someone spoke directly to him of their own volition, and once over the shock of it, his eyes narrowed, his mouth drew in a tight line, and then he bolted. Grabbing the Black Widow’s arm and hauling her out of the elevator, he beelined for the far exit and Steve dashed after him. _Shit. I forgot how fast he is._ Steve had blown it, so he might as well just go for broke now, he thought. He’d shaken Bucky out of dissociation before a few times, maybe he could do it again.

Tailing him out of the hotel, Steve found himself on an unexpectedly crowded street at night, where there seemed to be a…parade? He would have sworn it had been daytime when they were inside the hotel. Yes, he realized, it was a festival, and after a few seconds he figured out it was Carnival time. Steve looked up at the skyline: definitely Madrid. Why this job, of all things, and why suddenly Carnival revelers clogging the streets? What possible significance could this have had?

Dodging the sweating, dancing bodies, Steve wove through the crowd, picking up speed, almost losing Bucky twice. After seeming to understand that he couldn’t shake Steve, a tense Bucky and the Widow veered down a side street, Bucky looking over his shoulder repeatedly. It wasn’t as crowded here, so Steve just barely caught sight of him as he slipped inside the industrial-style metal door of a modern steel and concrete building. The door wasn’t locked so Steve opened it, and then somehow he was in an elevator car which clearly did not belong to this building—it was the hotel’s, judging by the fancy, old-fashioned dark wood walls, red patterned carpet, and gold and brass fixtures. None of the buttons worked for him; he had no choice but to watch the floor numbers light up as he rode to the top. 

When the car stopped, he found himself in a round room with an enormous ceiling—it looked Wakandan in many ways, but not entirely: there was something a bit western in it, from the old books on the gleaming shelves that looked as though they’d come from a Brooklyn library to the carved wooden doors with brass knobs that resembled early 1900s American decor more than modern East African. But there were also glass panel viewscreens set into the walls, bold white geometric lines on the shining black floor and ceiling—“the box” at last, he thought. Did the odd mix of elements here mean that Bucky had been building his own portal before things went haywire? Steve wondered what kind of other reveries were behind those doors.

Which door to open? Steve tried the handle closest to him, opening the door on a bunch of the Carnival revelers just standing there, pieces of costumes in their hands. They all turned to stare at him, sweaty faced with brash makeup running down their skin, staring at him as though he were an alien, and he backed out and closed the door, muttering “…oh-kaaay” under his breath. Six more doors ringed the room, but only one, he noticed, had a shimmering red mandala on the handle. It might be an exit mandala, or it might mean Bucky was behind that one. Steve went for it but stopped, distracted by a door that seemed to be…dripping something—no, not dripping, Steve saw on inspection, there were snowflakes swirling in front of it, the way flurries will sometimes dance in an updraft. Frost rimed the door knob. _Well, surely that’s a sign._ Ignoring the door with the mandala, then, he put his hand on the frozen handle and turned it, slow and cautious.

Steve stepped out onto a rooftop terrace, where there was a table set with fine crystal and china, a champagne bucket next to it. Had his subject been having dinner on the roof when the Soldier had murdered him? That wasn’t what the file had led Steve to believe.

The setting was oddly personal. The mission report had made it sound like the Black Widow had brought the target to her room, where Bucky’d shot him—not an intimate dinner for two on a rooftop terrace. 

Behind Steve came footsteps; he turned. Bucky stared darkly at him. “Who are you?”

“Steve. Remember? I’m Steve Rogers, your best friend. I’m here to help you, Bucky.”

“Who the hell is Bucky?”

Not that again. “There’s something you need to know.”

Shaking his head, he said, “You’re not supposed to be here. You don’t belong here.”

Steve drew his head back, frowning. That was a strange thing for him to say. Somehow Bucky knew who should be in this program and who shouldn’t. He even seemed to grasp that Steve shouldn’t be able to interact with him. If he knew that, why the hell was he unable to control the rest of it? “There’s a way for two of us to be in here now.”

He batted that aside as though it meant nothing to him. “What do you want?” Bucky snapped, the way you’d say it to a co-worker who wasn’t telling you why they were bothering you about a project. He was gathering intel, not making conversation. He wanted to know how to get rid of Steve.

“Something’s gone wrong in here and you’re in danger if you don’t come with me. I’m Steve. You know me, you used to trust me. We have to get out of here, all right?” _Come on, man,_ Steve wanted to say. _You always remembered me before, no matter how fragile the memory._ There had always been some tiny thread to pull on that would bring Bucky back.

“You don’t belong here. You’ll wreck everything.” He glanced toward the doorway when he said that, as though he was expecting someone to come through who had the power to harm him. 

“No, I—” and then before Steve could finish, that weird fracturing thing happened again: red energy crackled along the edges of huge portions of the building and the skyline as they broke apart into pieces or cracked, gaping black fissures opening wider and wider as segments crashed down. The sky and the cityscape pixelized and blurred, then began collapsing; it reminded him of the way the Triskelion buildings had been destroyed. Steve tried to reach for Bucky to take hold of him and haul him out, but instead Bucky twisted sideways, grabbed Steve’s arm, and hurled him through the balcony’s half wall. He was sailing off the building into empty sky before he could get hold of anything to stop his fall, the chunks of plaster wall plummeting with him. He flailed his arms, helpless. “Exitus!” Steve shouted, just before he crashed onto the taxicabs in the street below.

“Breathe,” Shuri said, her voice gentle and coaxing. “Remember to breathe.”

Steve clutched at his chest. “Got the wind knocked out of me again. Or I mean, I thought I did.” 

She read his pulse and other vitals. “Now you’re learning. Keep telling your mind that everything is normal.” After a few minutes, he sat up, and she asked, “Did you make contact, then? I take it this didn’t go well either.” Her face was twisted up, though she was trying her hardest to appear casual.

“Yeah, I made contact, and it was…just as disappointing as before. This time it didn’t start with childhood flashbacks, though. He was the Soldier, all the way through. Like he had some modicum of control.” Had he built in all the Winter Soldier stuff before he got stuck in there, or was all that—the table, the terrace, the Widow, the snow flurry at the door—coming from the program somehow? How much was Bucky and how much was Reverie?

“Do you feel up to giving us a briefing?” 

He nodded, rubbing his wrist, feeling his pulse slow and letting him calm himself. The three of them went over to lounge on the long, sprawling couches so he could describe what had happened. N’Deme took notes, seemed to find it fascinating, theorizing that Bucky could be simultaneously aware of being in Reverie and unaware of his own situation, somehow. 

“Because his mind is split,” Steve said, not certain if he was asking a question or verifying that he understood. All of this was so utterly foreign to him. “Like each side has vague awareness of the other but can’t pull them together, and the program is just…trying to put it in one narrative.”

“Or the part that built the world has been squashed down under the Soldier part that is using it to deal with something. Some particular trauma or even many traumas.” N’Deme circled a few words on his paper; Steve was always a little amused when someone from Wakanda used what he saw as old-fashioned tools, things that he himself was more comfortable with.

“But what? That’s what I can’t figure out. He’s bouncing from thing to thing—place to place, event to event. So far I haven’t seen any logic to it. How does that help him?”

“I don’t know that he chose it,” Shuri said evenly. She was probably right, and that’s what hurt the most, perhaps. He’d been carrying the guilt of not going back to find Bucky for seventy years and this was just bringing it all back up and pushing it to the front: none of this, not one single second of it, would have happened if Steve hadn’t let Bucky fall. Bucky’d never chosen any of it.

“I want to go back in right now,” Steve said, and the two of them looked at each other the way parents do when their kid has said something upsetting but they won’t discuss it in front of him. “I’m ready, and I don’t want—look, I know what he was like, at the core of him. It may better if I can keep him off balance for now, find out more of what’s going on before he has a chance to patch things over and erase his mistakes. Whatever his mind’s doing with the program…I shouldn’t let it get ahead of me. If I can’t pull him out right now, at least I can gather more intelligence, right?”

He still remembered that gut punch when Colonel Phillips had told him Bucky was dead, the way he’d felt instantly hollow and empty and cold, as though he might just float away. Even struggling against that sensation, even knowing Bucky was mostly likely gone and there was nothing for it, Steve had simply made himself resolute—if he couldn’t save Bucky, his unfocused mind had insisted, he could save someone else. So what did it matter if he couldn’t actually pull Bucky out of Reverie just yet? There was still something else he could do. Some other difference he could make.

“Indefatigable,” Shuri said, her brows going up.

“What’s that?” Steve cocked his head and gazed at her quizzically.

“The word I kept seeing over and over again in the books I read about you. When it comes to Barnes, you are _indefatigable,_ they said. They were not joking.” She reminded him intensely of Peggy at that moment, the almost condescending amusement on her face. The peculiar mix of disapproval and tolerant support.

“Yeah. I suppose I am.”

* * *

When Steve opened his eyes this time, he was slouched in a chair in the same hotel lobby, facing the elevator area. Everything else looked the same, too—the waiters bringing drinks, the people carrying luggage, the early afternoon sunlight slanting through the high windows. Somehow this was important to Bucky; he had come back to this starting point, even after his construct had been invaded by Steve.

He stood, looking around to see if he could spot Bucky; a man wearing a gray suit and tie and hat bumped into Steve. For a moment, Steve’s inclination was to think it deliberate, possibly one of the handlers monitoring the operation and Bucky’d put him here to test Steve’s presence, but then the man moved on, seeing him yet not really seeing him.

When the elevator dinged loudly, Steve whirled around and once again was face to face with Bucky, wearing the same clothes as last time. Had Bucky purposely reset the entire program and Steve was just arriving during an ongoing reverie by accident, or was he starting the program at this specific moment in time? How long had he been running this? It was strange that Steve kept arriving at this particular fixed time. 

Bucky was already alert, though, and zeroed Steve more quickly than before, as if he’d been expecting him, and he nearly shoved the Widow back into the elevator as the doors closed on them both. Before Steve could reach them, he made some sort of urgently worded instructions to her, almost as though she was a person with her own agency rather than a character he’d programmed, and Bucky’s angry eyes met his before the elevator swallowed him up. Steve tried to pry the doors apart, but even with all his strength, he couldn’t get them open.

“Shit.” Steve slammed his fist against the metal and then turned toward the lobby to regroup. 

“Hey! You!” Bucky barked, shocking the crap out of him and stalking up behind Steve with that loping, almost terrifying gait he remembered so well from the causeway in DC. “I told you to stay away from me.” Steve had _not_ expected that. 

Another interesting data point, Steve realized: Bucky remembered the entire previous encounter, not merely that Steve was an intruder. He remembered enough conversation to know what he’d wanted and not wanted inside this place.

“I can’t do that.” Steve tried to keep his voice neutral.

Clearly, he hadn’t anticipated a response because he froze, his mouth open. Still pissed off, though, and Steve thought _good_ —maybe if Bucky were off guard enough, Steve could get through to him.

“Your table before, up on the roof, the Black Widow—it all means something to you.”

It was like he could see the gears turning in Bucky’s head as he tried to figure out how Steve was able to be here, going on the offensive when this shouldn’t be possible in the world he’d built. The entire lobby went silent as everyone stopped in their tracks, like a freeze-frame. Even the small dog carried in one woman’s arms did nothing more than blink. A waiter was paused in mid-lean over a table, pouring coffee from a huge silver pot into a china cup—but the coffee didn’t stop as the people had, it cascaded over the rim of the cup and flowed across the table, onto the carpet, as the waiter stared at Steve. They _all_ stared at Steve, and it gave him such a case of the heebie-jeebies Steve had trouble focusing on Bucky. It felt as creepy as when he’d opened that library door on the Carnival revelers.

“Why the hell are you here?” Bucky snarled. Without a sense, now, of how to play offense with Steve, Bucky was trying to play defense. Steve punched the elevator button but he didn’t have to wait; the next thing he knew they had left the eerie lobby mannequins and were back on the rooftop terrace, the same lone table set with fine dinnerware as he’d seen last time, the same evening sunset view of Madrid spread out before them.

Bucky’s irritation radiated off of him, yet he made no move to try to harm Steve again. Maybe he wanted to see what Steve would do before he tried anything. “This place is obviously important to you,” he repeated as evenly as possible to see if he could jog some response loose.

“What business is that of yours?” Angry, but not I’m-gonna-kill-you angry.

“Was this where you completed your Spain mission? Your target was an official at the talks here, wasn’t he?”

His eyes narrowed, he seemed almost…bitterly amused. Steve could tell Bucky wanted to ask how he knew that, but he wasn’t interested in giving Steve the satisfaction of his curiosity. And then it hit Steve: this rooftop wasn’t about where he’d killed his target. None of this was about the target at all. This was about _him and the woman_.

Of course, Steve thought. Missions like these were the only times the Winter Soldier was allowed to act like a human being. To wear regular clothes instead of tactical gear, to eat fine cuisine instead of nutritional supplements, to sleep in a bed instead of an ice-cold coffin. To smile and talk and feel the sun on his face. To have a companion. It didn’t matter if they were each playing a part or that they barely knew one another, they were, for a little while, living a life. 

The mission in Spain was one of the earliest where the Soldier been allowed out this way, trusted as an agent of Hydra in the USSR—not monitored for every little deviation, not handled and ordered and snitched on. The 1950s had been up and down for the Winter Soldier project, according to the files: for every success in controlling and manipulating their asset, there was a disaster or malfunction that brought into stark relief how shaky their Soldier still was. It wasn’t until the end of the decade that they’d perfected the machine used to wipe his mind. Spain, however, and the Soldier’s previous mission in Greece—that was where they’d believed their project really shone, and for the next fifteen or so years, he’d been activated more often. No wonder this was the mission his fragmented mind had needed; it was the beginning of a simulacrum of freedom, and it hadn’t lasted very long.

If Steve left right now, would the Widow appear in the reverie, and they could finish out their time together? “Did you create this scenario for the reverie on purpose, or was it accidental?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Bucky responded, irritated.

“I mean…once you get what you need out of this, would you be willing to leave after you’re done?” Steve held his hands out, feeling helpless. It was impossible to gauge just how much Bucky was aware of and how deliberate this fantasy world was. The last thing he wanted was to send Bucky in deeper.

“Still don’t know what that means.” His temper was fraying; he looked like he was going to make this collapse again. Shit, Steve wasn’t certain what the correct play was here. Bucky knew Steve didn’t belong, that he was ruining things, yet he didn’t seem to know what those “things” actually were. No, Steve thought, that’s not quite right…

His mind was giving him some kind of respite, some taste of happiness. The program didn’t care if this was playacting or not. Maybe the kindest thing Steve could do was to let Bucky be alone with that for a little while, stop trying to pull him away from the first relief he’d had as Hydra’s captive. As long as he was all right on the outside and not in immediate danger, maybe Steve should just let him have this. Try again later.

“I know you don’t believe me, but I’m a friend. I’ll prove it to you in time. For now, though, I’ll leave you be.” There was a door to the little elevator alcove, and Steve noticed the doorknob was now a glowing red mandala, waiting for him to leave. “I’m coming back for you, Buck.”

Bucky stared at him, blank-faced, as Steve put his hand on the mandala. When he opened his eyes, Shuri was standing at the foot of his seat, anxious and tense.

“You know,” she said ruefully, “I think I am too old to take this. My heart is just not up to it.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I learned that I was wrong. I’ll let you make fun of me for a while after I tell you about it. That should make up for things, right?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But this better be good.”

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is adored and encouraging, as are likes/reblogs [on tumblr](https://teatotally.tumblr.com/post/632555364707090432/new-chapter-of-reverie)!
> 
> There are some elements of Marvel 616 comics in here as part of the worldbuilding, especially in some of the history of Wakanda. I've changed things to suit the story, though, and to fit with the MCU.
> 
> Many thanks to minim calibre for the beta and sineala for help with Latin.


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